The main objective of the project is to support the development of public transport schemes for medium-sized cities and urban regions in the North Sea Region. It is planned to develop a range of tools including a best practice guide and a set of standards for transport authorities to assess transport schemes.

The Northern Maritime Corridor is a sea based corridor aiming at attracting cargo from road to sea in an intermodal transport chain. In a long-term perspective the NMC?s ambition is to be defined as a Motorway of the Sea, linking Motorways of the Western Union and the Baltic Sea together. The first NMC project has already started a process of promoting the Northern Maritime Corridor as Motorway of the Sea. Its successful achievements in that matter have stimulated a need to continue the work. NMC II has been set up as a follow-up project to deal with those issues.

The project aims to facilitate the safe development of the maritime route from the Barents Region along the Norwegian coast to the core of Europe. It addresses the following issues: the development of regional maritime clusters, the promotion of Short Sea Shipping, transport in the petroleum and the seafood sector and risk management strategies. The project will be implemented in close co-operation with a similar project in the Interreg IIIB Northern Periphery Programme.

The current application focuses very much on challenges for ports in their traditional role as transhipment nodes for sea transports (i.e. on short sea but also deep sea shipping) and also in their more modern role as logistic centres within globalised logistic supply chains. The partners are strongly convinced that the two issues tackled here are of vital importance for the future of the ports and their regions but also for the NSR as a whole.

The project aims to continue the efforts made under the IIC project to establish a basis for regional development through a conscious use of transport corridors in an efficient and sustainable way by use of intermodal transport solutions. Nordic Transportpolitical Network (NTN) is a regional cooperation about transport, and the ?NTN-corridor? covers the transport systems in south-western Norway, western Sweden, western Denmark, and Schleswig-Holstein. The project will also outline how different nodes and routes within the corridor link up as part of regional transport strategies and plans. Parts of these strategies could then be implemented regionally. This approach could also be used as a generic method for promoting and developing other transport corridors. Moreover a joint database containing similar statistical data on goods transport in the regions included in the corridor will be built up and the partnership will also try to develop sustainable transport solutions.

The project addresses the integration of waterborne transport into intermodal transport and logistic chains with the aim of shifting cargo from road to waterborne transport. Partners will work with logistics competencies, optimisation and marketing in the regions involved.

The aim is to strengthen regional airports and the air transport network between them and thus improve the accessibility of peripheral regions. Activities include analysing passenger travel needs, proposing new transport routes, improving airport safety and presenting a policy paper on airports to relevant EU institutions. The project builds on a successful Baltic Sea Region project.

SHARED SPACE explores and exploits the potential for integrating infrastructure and traffic engineering, safety and spatial planning in transnational context to prevent erosion of social and environmental quality of the public realm. The approach has identified different types of road users with problems arising in a 'crushable zone'; integrating infrastructure and traffic engineering instruments into a cross-sector planning and designing process shall prove to reconcile the demands of the different types of road users and improve the quality of landscape and the built surroundings, pedestrian movement and social activities.

The overall aims of SustAc-cess are on the one hand to make gateways more accessible from their hinterlands and on the other to support an increased use of more sustainable modes of transport. It covers both goods and passenger transport and includes partners ranging from gateway cities to smaller towns in hinterland areas. Partner activities and pilot projects include a wide variety of activities such as supporting the development of different gateway cities and their connection to their hinterland or improving public transport and making it more accessible.

The project includes different work packages in the field of mobility management to facilitate the use of alternative modes of transport to the car. The work packages address the following issues: Travel to work, mobility education, travel to visitor attractions and transport in urban areas.