The lnterreg project UrbFRail is a cooperation project between the Senate Department for Mobility, Transport, Climate Protection and the Environment as project lead partner and partners from Poland and Sweden for the reactivation of inner-city freight stations. The Interreg Smal Scale Project has a total duration of 18 months.

Together with the SGKV, I support the SenMVKU in the creation of the BSR Urban Freight Rail Development Tool. The planned tool to support the development of urban freight transport is intended to help urban planners and transport planners to design a systematic process for the reactivation of a freight station in order to make greater use of the more environmentally friendly rail mode of transport than before. The focus here is on the use of combined transport, which already accounts for around 40 % of the total rail freight transport volume (see SGKV: "Facts and figures 2022", p.4) and is expected to grow further in the future.

Firstly, the existing conditions and circumstances for the development of freight transport hubs in all partner cities are recorded. Supplemented by the information from this inventory, a development procedure is drawn up. This procedure divides the development process into various steps and tasks and provides initial recommendations for the further course of the process. This initial procedure is then trialled in the partner cities. After the developed instruments have been tested on site, the results are evaluated in local peer review workshops.

Note: The project description was created together with the client and project partner and has been slightly modified by me for this article.