On December 17, 2020, the proposal initiated by Vidzeme Planning Region to provide passenger transportation based on their demand received the support of the Parliament of the Republic of Latvia (Saeima), and the Parliament instructed the Cabinet of Ministers to submit a draft law by...

Over the course of three years, the MAMBA project has introduced several innovative measures to meet the challenge of rural mobility in the Baltic Sea region. The final outputs shall support the promotion of sustainable “people-to-service” and “service-to-people” mobility solutions in rural areas and can...

On October 12, representatives of Vidzeme Planning Region (VPR) met with Minister of Transport Tālis Linkaits to present the results and conclusions of the transport on-demand pilot project, as well as suggested the creation of a support mechanism to improve mobility in rural areas. The results of the implemented pilot project clearly show that the demand for passenger transport also exists in remote and sparsely populated rural areas.

The MAMBA consortium has gathered all the knowledge and experience gained during these last years while working on rural mobility solutions and has launched three publications that will be of help to those who work with said issue.

On September 30, the pilot project "transport on-demand" implemented by Vidzeme planning region, organized for 11 months in the territories of Mazsalaca and Alūksne counties, was completed. The collected data show that 2777 passengers were transported, 1277 trips were made, and 24,821 kilometres were travelled.

To mark the end of the pilot project “transport on demand”, Vidzeme region prepared a video story, where the main characters are Vidzeme residents. The five-minute film focuses on four “transport on-demand” passengers in Alūksne and Mazsalaca counties, revealing the real situation on the state border and also elsewhere in Latvia, where the public transport service is insufficient.

The final chapter of the MAMBA Final Web Conference gathered experts from politics, administration and academia who engaged in a conversation about the responsibility and impact of decision-makers when it comes to tackling rural mobility challenges.

The second session of MAMBA's Final Web Conference took place on 10 September, on Zoom. Around 80 participants gathered in the online medium to discuss rural mobility and discover several successful solutions implemented throughout Europe.

On 3 September, MAMBA project launched its Final Web Conference with a session that tried to set the scene when it comes to rural mobility and its intricacies, with more than 100 participants joining the online event.

We hope you will join us for the “No future for rural Europe? Breaking the vicious circle with successful mobility and accessibility ideas” conference, which we will hold as a series of webinars on the 3, 10 and 17 September 2020, 10:00 – 11.30 CET.

Like many other organisations during the last few months, the Trelleborg team has been deeply affected by the COVID-19 crises. It had to take the difficult decision of shutting down their rural mobility solutions, as complying with recommendations issued by the Swedish Government.

MAMBA partners in South Ostrobothnia have held the first Regional Steering Group meeting on the 25th of June 2020. The Regional Steering Group (RSG) acts as the Mobility Centre in South Ostrobothnia

In the Finnish South Ostrobothnia, MAMBA project was displayed at two project fairs in the early spring of 2020. MAMBA project partners in the region, Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences and the Regional Council of South Ostrobothnia were proud to present MAMBA, share information on rural mobility and the activities done locally.

On 27 February 2020, on a rainy Thursday, forty-six stakeholders and partners of the MAMBA project from Northern Germany and Denmark took part in a regional conference.

At the end of March 2020, the MAMBA partners met up digitally, to discuss each other’s progress and the overall development of the project.

MAMBA Fifth Rural Mobility Seminar, transformed into a webinar, has successfully taken place on the 26 March 2020.

Before work on the Bielsko District Mobility Centre was started, an analysis of the availability of such solutions and their effectiveness was carried out. At the initial stage of the work, it seemed that there was a need to create a physical office, where our staff would provide interested people with advice on the possibilities of moving around the Bielsko District using the available forms of transport, over the phone.

From September 2019, a new Transport on-demand service is active in the area of Bielsko-Biala. The pilot programme, active mostly within the Wilkowice commune, with a population of approximately 13,000 people, is implemented on the Wilkowice - Granica-Stalowik to Bielsko-Biala and Stalownik Bielsko-Biala to Wilkowice Granica axis.

On 19th February 2020, a new digital public transport service called POJO was launched in North Karelia, Finland. Now, information of train and bus transportation in North Karelia can be found from the same place. This allows residents and travellers to easily plan their journey in the region and makes public transportation more appealing.

On 27 February 2020, on a rainy Thursday, forty-six stakeholders and partners of the MAMBA project from Northern Germany and Denmark took part in a regional conference.

Trelleborg Municipality, through the MAMBA pilot and co-working space, is nominated for most innovative public solution!

On January 31, 2020, local politicians from 26 municipalities in the Vidzeme region gathered in Cesis to hear about the progress of the MAMBA project and the pilot of transport-on-demand in Latvia.

Trelleborg and Södra Åbys hembygdsförening participated at the 2020 Rural Community Centres National Association conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

On 7 February 2020, the Regional Stakeholders Meeting of the MAMBA project was organised jointly by the District Bielsko and the Regional Development Agency in Bielsko - Biała. The project's results, its regional context and main activities were presented during the meeting.

On 11 February 2020, Trelleborg Municipality welcomed stakeholders and other interested actors to an event discussing mobility and service in rural areas.

A new stakeholders meeting within the MAMBA project took place on the 28 Janury 2020. The event was organised by the MAMBA teams in South Ostrobothnia, Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences and Regional Council of South Ostrobothnia.

Since the Vidzeme Planning Region has launched a pilot project "transport on demand" in two municipalities of the Vidzeme Planning Region - Aluksne and Mazsalaca municipalities, one and a half months have passed and the first data on the results of the service have been collected.

Every month, since March 2018, more than 400 people call a phone number, order a taxi and then wait for their ride at the closest bus stop. This system, called "ALFA" was implemented by the county of Plön, in Germany, around the small town Lütjenburg, in the north-eastern part of the county.

MAMBA project has been fostering success stories with the partners developing their pilot and Mobility Centre initiatives. One of these cases is that of the Municipality of Trelleborg, where school buses have been put to good use. If during weekdays these are used to transport school children to and from school, during weekends they serve a different purpose.

The fourth MAMBA seminar, which took place on 12 November 2019 in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, was titled “Rural development and mobility – more than just transportation”.

For the first time In Latvia, a pilot project “transport on demand” has been launched and is already experimentally operating in the territory of Vidzeme Planning Region. Currently, the service is being tested in two counties of the region – Mazsalaca County and Alūksne County....

A new Transport-on-Demand pilot was launched on 21 October 2019 in two areas of Vidzeme: Alūksne County and Mazsalaca County. The pilot is part of MAMBA project and it was presented during the National Public Transport Council by Līga Puriņa-Purīte, project manager in Vidzeme Planning...

Share your car with your neighbour! After a successful launch on 9 September 2019 Vejle municipality, partner of the MAMBA project, continues promoting their pilot in the Smidstrup-Skærup village area. Posters advertising the NABOGO App have been placed in strategic spots around the area, in...

Trelleborg Municipality kicked off the European Mobility week by giving a presentation of the MAMBA project. The presentation took place at the city hall, in front of the municipality’s officials. The Trelleborg team will be active during the whole European Mobility Week and will also...

Share your car with your neighbour! On 9 September 2019 Vejle municipality, partner of the MAMBA project, launched their pilot in the Smidstrup-Skærup village area. The initiative consists of the app NABOGO, and it aims to enhance mobility and comes as a response for the...

Trelleborg Municipality has been working on using existing resources in new useful and creative ways. Together with the department for social services and the manager for the municipality’s school buses, they have managed to create a platform and a new form of activity for the...

On 22 August 2019, MAMBA partner from South Ostrobothnia (Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences and Regional Council of South Ostrobothnia) presented MAMBA project at the annual Rural Researchers event in Ähtäri, Finland. The event was organised by Maaseudun Uusi Aika (MUA), The Finnish Society for...

The MAMBA partners develop nine innovative Mobility Centers in different parts of the Baltic Sea Region. While they differ in format and scope and cover a broad spectrum of organisational setups, the MAMBA Mobility Centers have one thing in common: by fostering cooperation of administrative...

On the 29th of May, MAMBA project, together with Nordregio, organised the first webinar focused on rural mobility issues and how these can be improved. If you didn’t have the chance to join the discussion but are interested in the topic, now you can watch...

The 10th Annual Forum of the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region 2019 took place on 12 and 13 June 2019, in Gdańsk (Poland). On the second day of the event, Aleksandra Chrystowska-O’Shea, representative from the Bielsko-Biala Regional Development Agency represented MAMBA in a...

The City of Seinäjoki has launched itself recently as a capital of space. As inhabitants of the capital of space, we wanted to show to our MAMBA guests where this idea came from and took on our first day of project meeting a bus to...

Vidzeme Planning Region (Latvia) actively continues to work on the implementation of the Transport on Demand (ToD) service in two municipalities of Vidzeme region – in Alūksne and Mazsalaca counties. Initially, the project team predicted the launch of the service by the beginning of the...

On 5 June 2019, a new MAMBA Mobility Seminar took place in the town of Seinäjoki, in Finland. This was the third Rural Mobility Seminar in a series of six, each one of them focusing on one specific challenge within the area of rural mobility....

In March, Vejle Kommune and NaboGo participated in an event in Smidstrup, Southern Denmark, where they launched the idea and work behind the App “NaboRide”. The app is created in connection to the EU project MAMBA and focuses on mobility in local areas. The results...

Between 8 and 10 of May, members of the MAMBA project took part in the BSSSC Board meeting that took place in Cēsis, Latvia. The topic of the meeting was to discuss strategies for the development of the Baltic Sea Region, when considering the implementation...

Working in the MAMBA project means networking and connecting stakeholders, learning from each other, exchanging ideas and even reassembling modules from other projects. In our case we integrate a module from the “Masterplan Mobilität” – a mobility strategy which works on a large range of...

National and international experts from labour unions, associations, politics and from the business world participated at the Mobility Congress in Berlin. The event took place on the 8 and 9 of May and was hosted by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. The attendants discussed topics connected to mobility...

On April 23rd, the MAMBA good practice cases database was launched at the Nordregio office in Stockholm, during a small scale event attended by partners from Nordregio and the Municipality of Trelleborg. The database was developed by the Municipality of Trelleborg and its aim is...

The launching event of the Mobility Centre and transport-on-demand service in Vidzeme (Latvia) took place on 4 March in the municipality of Mazsalaca county and on 12 and 13 March in the municipalities of the Alūksne county. Since the Mazsalaca county and the Aluksne county...

The Horizon2020 project “HiReach – innovative solutions to cope with transport poverty” has invited a number of mobility and transportation experts, start-uppers, industry professionals, entrepreneurs, designers, researchers, public officials, and representatives of vulnerable groups to a Multidisciplinary Ideation Workshop in Brussels on 27 and 28...

The MAMBA Team of the Diaconie of Schleswig-Holstein and their associated partner, the Academy for Rural Areas of Schleswig-Holstein (ALR), jointly organised a Workshop with a number of village workers who take care of other inhabitants, called “Dorfkümmerer”. The event took place in Rendsburg on...

On Friday 29 March 2019, Annika Schmiedek-Inselmann (Diaconie Schleswig-Holstein) visited the mayor of Hallig Hooge and participated in a town hall meeting regarding public services to discuss the implementation of the MAMBA’s service-to-people pilot in the region. Hallig Hooge is located in the Wadden Sea...

On March 25, representatives of Vidzeme Planning Region met with Latvia’s Minister of Transport, Tālis Linkaits, to introduce the planned transport-on-demand initiative in Vidzeme, a service that will be offered for the first time in Latvia thanks to MAMBA. The meeting was successful, since it...

The MAMBA project was invited to give a presentation of its aims and developments during an event that took place in the town of Outokumpu, Finland. The purpose of the event was to present and discuss new ideas regarding mobility and transport solutions in the...

A main task of the MAMBA project is the development of Mobility Centres (MC) within the pilot areas. With is launch in January 2019, the MC in Seinäjoki was among the first ones going into service, followed by its counterparts in Cuxhaven and Plön (Germany)...

At the end of February 2019, the MAMBA partners met up in the town of Vejle, in Southern Denmark, to discuss each other’s progresses and the overall development of the project. During the meeting, the involved partners talked about their experiences, distributed tasks, set up...

The second Rural Mobility Seminar took place on the 21 February 2019, in Vejle, Denmark. It proved to be a great success in discussing current Transport-On-Demand mobility solutions and fostering further exchange and cooperation between relevant stakeholders. Hosted by the MAMBA partners from Vejle, the...

At the end of January 2019, MAMBA project partners participated in the SMARTA workshop organised in Brussels, taking the opportunity to present key facts, pilots, events, goals of the MAMBA project and a newly launched database that integrates examples of best practice when it comes...

On 9 February 2019, Latvia’s new Transport Minister Talis Linkaitis, Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry, Janis Butans and the Head of the Minister’s Office, Arita Udre, visited Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences. Leading by example, they took the train to Vidzeme from Riga. The minister...

The MAMBA project partners organised a parallel session on innovative rural mobility solutions in the Nordics at the Nordregio Forum on 29 November 2018. The aim of the session was to provide an overview of current and future trends in innovative rural mobility solutions in...

The Finnish MAMBA-partners, including the Regional Council of South Ostrobothnia, the South Ostrobothnia Health Technology Development Centre and the Regional Council of North Karelia participated in the Rural Development Seminar in Mikkeli. This event included a project presentation and thematic discussions with rural-transport-experts. The seminar...

The tradition of trading and bargaining, part of the societal heritage of the medieval Hanseatic city of Valmiera, was celebrated during the Research Night, on 28 September at the Valmiera Marketplace, and hosted a corner dedicated to the MAMBA project. Researchers Janis Bikse and Agita...

The creation of the Mobility Centre in South Ostrobothnia is moving forward. In a first step, the Regional Council of South Ostrobothnia initiated the outline of the Regional Analytical Framework. The purpose of the Framework Report is to offer up-to-date information on regional health- and...

The first Rural Mobility Seminar organised by MAMBA on 27 September 2019 in Riga (Latvia), dealt with mobility innovations and whether these are specifically driven by large cities or large private companies. Naturally, such companies invest where they see the biggest market potential, which is...

Photo: Jan Schmidt / Investitionsbank Schleswig-Holstein This September, MAMBA was presented at the BSSSC’s 26th Annual Conference in Gdansk, Poland. BSSSC (Baltic Sea States Sub-Regional Cooperation) was established in 1993 as a political network for decentralised authorities in the Baltic Sea Region. At its 26th...

September 25-26 all partners met in Cesis in Vidzeme Region in Lativa for the 4th trans-national partner meeting. Cesis is located approximately two hours from Riga (by bus) and faces many of the same challenges as other rural areas around the Baltic Sea Region. The...

The Products page is filling up fast with different kinds of products produced in the project so far. You’ll find case studies, regional profiles, maps, factsheets and pre-studies, and more will come. Take a look at them here!

On 20 July MAMBA lead partner Diakonisches Werk Schleswig-Holstein was visited by Dr. Sabine Sütterlin-Waack, Schleswig-Holstein’s Minister of Justice, Europe, Consumer Protection and Equality. Many rural areas in Schleswig-Holstein are confronted with diminishing bus connections, shut down train lines and neglected roads. In particular health...

The 3rd meeting between Diaconie and their associated partners from NordKolleg took place on 1 March 2019, in Rendsburg. The participants, among which were associated partners, regional stakeholders and representatives of the local Mobility Centre, focused on discussing the facets, dimensions and challenges of health...

On 28 and 29 May, the Fehmarnbelt Days united public and private stakeholders from mobility, infrastructure, civil society and other fields to discuss the future development of the region. The Diaconie of Schleswig-Holstein, Lead Partner of MAMBA, presented the project to the interested public. While...

The 3rd trans-national MAMBA partner meeting took place on 22 and 23 of March, in Joensuu, North Karelia. The MAMBA consortium will evaluate existing, sustainable ways of managing and financing rural mobility that could be transferred to other regions.

Last week communications managers from several projects in the current programme period met for two days of workshops and talks, all with the aim of improving communications and outreach in the projects. This was also an opportunity to connect with people from other projects and lay the ground for collaboration and knowledge exchange.

The next partner meeting in Mamba takes place in North Karelia in Finland, the easternmost region of continental Europe. The region hosts a population of 164,000 and its capital is Joensuu, and this is also where the meeting will be held.

Doris Scheer is the Project Leader for Mamba and represents the Diakonisches Werk Schleswig-Holstein. Hear some of her thoughts on the project here below!

The 2nd trans-national meeting took place in Neumünster, Germany 15 and 16 November 2017, and was hosted by the lead partner, Diakonie Schleswig-Holstein.