{Working Group Meeting, 23 January 2018 (Pskov)}

On January 23, 2018, Pskov hosted the first working group meeting for the project “Cities.Multimodal: Change Cities – from Car Orientation to Sustainable Urban Mobility” of the INTERREG Baltic Sea Region Programme 2014-2020. The meeting brought together the Pskov’s leading experts and specialists in transport, beatification, culture, tourism, traffic control, transport planners and engineers, cycling communities jointly with representatives of the ICSER Leontief Centre, who coordinate the project “Green Mobility – Towards Clean, Healthy and Accessible Environment”.

The seminar began with the International Green Mobility Awards Ceremony. Established as an Oscar for Sustainable Development, the International Green Mobility Award is given to the cities that are eager to become open, comfortable, safe and environmentally sustainable. Elena Belova, Secretary General at ICSER Leontief Centre, Green Mobility Project Coordinator, presented award to the city of Pskov, and gave certificates to Kristina Kobyz, Head of Department for Implementation of Cross-Border Cooperation Programmes, Pskov City Administration, and to Natalia Goleva, Head of the External Economic Relations Department, State Committee of the Pskov Region for Economic Development and Investment Policy, for their active participation in Green Mobility partner network.

This particular contribution to Green Mobility project by city and regional officials made it possible to become a Cities.Multimodal project partner. The project wants to make it easier for people in cities to combine walking, cycling, public transport and car-sharing as an environmentally friendly alternative to driving. The partners develop and apply an approach to sustainable urban mobility planning for such multimodal transport that is easy to adopt in the cities.

The project partnership includes 17 participants from 8 European countries: Germany, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia, which is presented by the Pskov City Administration and ICSER Leontief Centre (associated partner).

In the first part of the seminar, participants discussed sustainable urban transportation system and its development prospects in Pskov, existing challenges of urban space and ways to overcome them in order to make Pskov livable and attractive for citizens and city guests. Pskov annually hosts a series of major international events that raise its investment and tourism attractiveness and, certainly, affect the urban transportation system. Nowadays, Pskov’s road network is one of the busiest in the North-West Russia. In 2019, the city will host over 200 delegations from Russia and European Union within the 39th International Hanseatic Days. The main challenge for Pskov is to provide transport accessibility and develop safe and user-friendly urban mobility for citizens and city guests.

In the second part of the seminar, Olga Iakimenko, ICSER Leontief Centre, Green Mobility Project Development Coordinator and Andrey Kostyuchenko, Green Mobility Project Expert showcased Nordic best practices in sustainable urban mobility along with possible solutions and activities towards better transport accessibility that can be applied in the project Cities.Multimodal.