Transport Infrastructures for better Accessibility, Equity and Territorial Cohesion
20-21 October 2016, Warsaw, Poland
It is our pleasure to invite all NECTAR members for the joint meeting of Cluster 1 (Networks) and Cluster 6 (Accessibility) which will be held in Warsaw in the fall 2016. The conference will bring together leading researchers and practitioners from Europe and elsewhere. The location of the meeting in Warsaw will be a great opportunity to engage researchers particularly from Central and Eastern European countries into NECTAR activities. We believe that it will be a great possibility to share and exchange latest knowledge and experiences in the field of accessibility and transport analyses.
During the last decade Poland has experienced an enormous development of transport infrastructure: newly built motorway sections, modernized railway lines and several investments into public transport infrastructure, including e.g. bike-sharing systems. Other countries of the region have followed similar path of development. It creates a ‘real laboratory’ to investigate a complex relations between transport infrastructure development and accessibility issues, including their impact on equity and territorial cohesion. However, such a huge ‘big push’ to transport infrastructure development is also challengeable, especially in terms of a proper evaluation of implemented or planned investments (i.e. both, ex-ante and ex-post evaluation). Gaining from the experience of the countries that had already faced the similar challenges may only be valuable, especially when defining opportunities and threats (best practices and risks, related to, e.g. overinvestment).