About 40 representatives from Venlo, Sofia, Piraeus, Bilbao, Antwerp, Cologne, Tallinn and the Vital Nodes project came together in Venlo on February 8th 2019 to discuss how freight transport can be made sustainable on all levels of the transeuropean transport network: on the local, the metropolitan and on the corridor level. In three working groups the participants discussed their challenges, projects and strategies related to the topics “Energy transition in the freight sector”, “Synergies between freight and passenger transport” and “Quality of life from a spatial planning perspective”. In the following, they collected their support, funding and innovation needs for sustainable freight and formulated recommendations to the European Commission. They suggest for example to distribute CEF-funding with a data-based methodology to make sure that highly functioning urban nodes in terms of freight load receive the funding they need to better balance the secondary effects of being logistic hubs.
