Interreg Alpine Space: DEGREE4ALPS

The project DEGREE4ALPS aims to improve accessibility for all citizens in Alpine peripheral and rural areas, and to enhance green mobility operations through digitalisation.)
Scattered villages and low population characterise the Alpine region. These conditions make it difficult to provide attractive and easily accessible public transport for everyone in these rural and peripheral regions. In non-urban areas, this lack of access to mobility often leads to social exclusion. For these reasons, the aim of DEGREE4ALPS is to facilitate the local population's access to public transport by combining and actively applying different mobility measures through digitalisation and new innovative social approaches.

Project content

The common challenge is to increase sustainable accessibility and social inclusion by integrating traditional, flexible and shared, formal and informal mobility options through a set of digital tools and social innovation approaches. DEGREE4ALPS is therefore conceived as a novel and seamless transportation offer tailored to peripheral and rural areas, ready to reap the benefits of mobility digitalisation to enhance social inclusion for citizens, accessibility and territorial cohesion.

As Lead Partner, the University of Passau will coordinate the project. Partners from Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland and Austria will implement two joint pilot activities, developing and testing digital measures in the different areas (Bavaria (DE), Belluno (IT), Maribor (SI), Ticino (CH), Šmartno pri Litiji (SI), and Styria (AT)). Two solutions will be consolidated, validated and upscaled building on the outcomes of the pilot activities. The activities will consist of a flexible and shared digital mobility model for inclusive communities, and an energy model to support the ecological transition. Measures such as digital route planners with a special focus on accessibility, the testing of booking systems for sustainable mobility solutions or a monitoring and analysis tool for the integration of renewable energy in the context of mobility are amongst those to be tested.

By formulating action plans, designing training formats and setting up broad-based communication measures, the long-term implementation as well as the transfer and dissemination of the jointly developed solutions are to be guaranteed.

Project partners

• Deutscher Alpen Verein – Sektion Oberland
• Redmint Social Enterprise
• DOLOMITI BUS S.P.A.
• Municipality of Maribor
• University of Maribor
• Universita' della Svizzera italiana
• BePooler SA
• Municipality of Šmartno pri Litiji
• Climate Alliance Styria