Through MATCH-UP, the County of Northeim is seeking to improve the policy instrument by implementing a new on-demand transport service within the County of Northeim, which will be integrated into the existing public transport to improve rural transport connectivity for rural citizens with mobility or health issues. The Local Transport Plan (LTP) is thus the policy instrument and the central document for the identification and definition of topics, into which the lessons and experiences of the MATCH-UP project are to be incorporated in order to determine the appropriate mobility solutions for the rural County of Northeim. In the course of revising the LTP the County formulated a test order to its responsible Public Transport Authority (ZVSN) for the pilot implementation of an on-demand transport offer. After the approval of the political bodies of the County and the ZVSN, this was included in the LTP with the aim of introducing a needs-based mobility offer. As a result, on-demand traffic is a binding regulation that must be observed in the future.
The other ongonig EU-Project "Mobility Opportunities Valuable to Everybody (MOVE)" is focused on an e-car and bikesharing system. Such offers can already be found in larger cities and now an e-car and bikesharing system is also to be tested in the rural area of the County of Northeim. For this purpose, the County is carring out a tender to draw the attention of providers of e-car and bike sharing to the region. This is a pilot project that is initially intended to test the need for and acceptance of such concepts among the local population.
Our partner in the operation area of ZVSN, the County of Göttingen, was given the award "Bicycle-friendly Lower Saxony 2021 to 2025" on October 2nd, 2020. The promotion of cycling has a very high priority in the County of Göttingen, but there are also some challenges, as only about twenty percent of the federal state and county roads are equipped with separate cycle paths.
