Report on Final Conference in Brno
The final conference called SMART SOLUTIONS FOR URBAN AND REGIONAL MOBILITY IN EUROPE of the SOLEZ project took place at the Brno Exhibition Centre on 6th June within the Urbis trade fair. The aim of the trade fair was to present the state-of-the-art solutions for smart cities and municipalities. The organizer of the conference was KORDIS JMK which is a coordinator of the public transport system in the South Moravian Region.
The SOLEZ project seeks to support low emission zones and other low-carbon mobility policies in European cities. The project started in June 2016 and it is expected to be finalised in July 2019. 10 partners from 7 European countries (Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and Italy) are involved in the project.
The event was launched by a special historical train tour from Brno-dolní nádraží station to the area of the Exhibition Centre. After welcoming speech of Jiří Horský who is the director of KORDIS spoke Winfried Ritt from the Joint Secretariat of the Interreg Central Europe Programme. Zuzana Švédová from the Brno Transport Research Centre presented the project results in the field of smart parking. Then Květoslav Havlík from KORDIS and Pavel Orlíček from Masaryk University covered the topic of P+R (park and ride) in the South Moravian Region. Mr. Havlík introduced a new application which displays all P+R places in the South Moravian Region. Then he presented existing systems providing data about actual location of regional public transport vehicles to passengers and explained possible usage of these data for informing car drivers about the next connections from a P+R car park.
After a lunch break, the topic of electric and hydrogen buses was discussed. Joško Deur (University of Zagreb) gave an overview about electrification of city bus transport. Other speakers from Ostrava public transport company and University of Žilina contributed with their observation.
The last section was dedicated to the problematics of small shops in the city centres. The speakers from Vicenza and Graz were considering whether mobility policies are shaping our habits and cities. The conference was concluded with a discussion lead by David Bárta on the topic of the future of urban mobility. The discussion drew attention of many participants since they talked for a long time.
The conference was successful, which is also reflected in the positive feedback from the participants. In total, about 120 visitors attended the conference.
