The CHALLENGE GUTS partners are facing is how to reconcile economic development and accessibility of their cities with improving quality of life, environmental protection and fighting Climate Change. The main environmental problems in cities are linked to the increasing air pollution (currently 31% of all emissions) coming from transport (of which up to 7 % coming from public transport).

The project tackles this problem through a pioneer approach, following the line of the Commission Directive on promotion of clean and energy efficient road transport vehicles (COM2007).

The OVERALL OBJECTIVE of GUTS is to contribute to sustainable urban mobility in Central Europe, helping cities & urban agglomerations (public authorities, transport operators) to meet requirements for a greener environment. GUTS partners chose to focus on one SPECIFIC aspect of this OBJECTIVE and will work together on creating a strong institutional, financial & technological basis for the developmentof sustainable and clean public transport (PT) systems.

The driving force behind the PARTNERSHIP will be local authorities and transport operators motivated to improve, define and implement strategies for PT conversion. Next to that, following the Triple Helix approach, knowledge institutions and a representation of the industry also plays a crucial role in the partnership as providers of knowledge and expertise and representing the supply side.

The added value of working together will be to create a knowledge base in a comparative framework, capitalise on all existing results and promote economies of scale regarding technology development.

ACTIVITIES will start with 1) the core issue of capitalisation: building on experiences of existing models, state of art technologies and 2) regional analyses: taking specific (technical & financial) constraints & needs (citizens needs, policy agendas, past initiatives) into consideration (e.g. where guided line technologies are often not possible).

GUTS was recently mentioned in an international magazine: You may download the full article here.