Tampere region had the last stakeholder meeting on 30 May 2022. We had ten participants representing the City of Tampere, Nysse (public transport in the Tampere region), Business Tampere (business development agency of the city of Tampere), Tuomi Logistics (procurement and logistics company owned by the cities and the municipalities), Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment (state-owned), Transport Research Centre Verne from Tampere University and the Council of Tampere Region.
At the beginning of the meeting professor, Heikki Liimatainen from Verne (Tampere University) gave an overview of key research and development themes and ongoing projects in the Transport Research Centre Verne of Tampere University. Verne will organize ICoMaaS 2022 Conference in the Tampere Hall on 29-30 November 2022.
Then, our director of regional development Matti Lipsanen introduced the new structural fund program Innovation and Skills in Finland 2021-2027 and other relevant funding programmes and instruments. Passenger transport director Jussi Teronen from Tuomi Logistics highlighted the challenges related to the charging infrastructure for electric cars in municipalities. Which entity could be the right financer? The matter does not proceed according to market conditions. The representatives of the council promised to look into the matter.
Senior business advisor Jari Ikonen from Business Tampere highlighted the current projects related to smart mobility and MaaS, e.g.
- Smart City Test Area – Towards Level 4 Automated Transport tamperetestbed.fi/en/test-area/smart-city-testialue-hervanta/
- Operation of autonomous movement
Jari Ikonen also told about the upcoming Tampere Smart City Week event (which took place on 14-15 June 2022) and its Smart Mobility programme.
In their speech, planning director Ruut-Maaria Rissanen and development manager Marja-Riitta Mattila-Nurmi reviewed the experiences and results obtained in the PriMaaS project. They reported on experiences from the partner meeting organized in Edinburgh in April. The regional action plan resulting from the PriMaaS project, in which the policy instrument under development was still changed during late spring, was presented. The new targeted policy instrument is the Tampere Region Regional Programme including S3 (2022-2025). PriMaas project has strongly influenced the workings of the programme and its missions and the S3. All funding distributed by the council is channelled through the Regional Programme. During PriMaaS Phase 2, the implementation of the programme will be followed and monitored.
The takeover of the new welfare areas in Finland in terms of publicly organized passenger transport is underway in the Tampere region. The roles of different actors in the future were discussed.
Finally, we thanked the stakeholder group members for their very active participation in all meetings and project activities during PriMaaS Phase 1.
