The Committee of the Regions’ commission for territorial cohesion policy (COTER) adopted a draft opinion calling for intensifying EU co-funded investment to connect information and ticketing services for public passengers transport at supranational, national, regional and local level. This should be a first, crucial step towards the implementation of an EU-wide integrated platform for information, planning and ticketing services covering all available transport modes and providers across Europe.
In the draft opinion by Petr Osvald (CZ/PES), regions and cities show their full awareness of the huge complexity of the challenge to implement an EU-wide integrated system for multimodal transport planning. They recommend that the EU strategy should initially focus on public passenger transport and only subsequently add individual transport.
With regards to the concrete implementation of the proposed integrated systems, the rapporteur shares the point raised by the European Commission in its working document that the first/last mile are the most complicated stages in terms of travel information and service provision. Since this stage is often managed by local and regional authorities, it is absolutely essential to involve them in both implementing all the methods and monitoring how they work to make sure the whole system functions well.
Furthermore, the draft opinion stresses that it is essential that each Member State commits to creating a national system bringing together all static transport timetables in operation and enabling public transport connections to be looked for and booked within a single country. This goal could be reached at national level also by introducing the obligation, for transport operators – public and private –, to make about their timetables available. The setting up of such national multimodal timetable information systems would be the first step towards the creation of a similar system for Europe as a whole. This interconnection process could start by interconnecting regional information systems, and subsequently across borders.
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