NICHES (New and Innovative Concepts for Helping European Transport Sustainability)is a two-year project supported by the European Commission's Directorate General for Research within the context of the 6th Framework Programme. The project started on 1 November 2004. NICHES facilitates the coordination of research activities of academic institutions, industry, mobility operators and transport authorities regarding key urban transport innovations that lack broad deployment. NICHES aims to stimulate a wide debate between relevant stakeholders from different sectors and disciplines across the EU and accession countries, in order to promote the most promising new concepts from their current niches position to a mainstream urban transport policy application. Within NICHES twelve urban transport innovative concepts have been identified, which have been successfully implemented in a limited number of cities. The success factors and barriers for their implementation have been explored in order to study their transferability to other urban contexts. The NICHES team is currently at the stage of finding synergies between the different innovative concepts in order to develop integrated packages of NICHES innovative concepts combined with mainstream measures that can contribute to fulfilling specific urban transport policy objectives. The 12 concepts have been identified within 4 thematic areas identified as particularly important for more sustainable urban mobility. One of these thematic areas is New Non-Polluting and Energy Efficient Vehicles (A). For the covering abstract of the conference see ITRD E212343.
Abstract