A Vital Nodes workshop took place in Gdynia, March 13th, with several members of the Gdynia Planning Department, Department for Analysis and Cooperation and public transport providers. The aim of the workshop was to discuss funding and innovation needs of TriCity, and of Gdynia in particular. As entrance and exit point on the Baltic corridor, the port city is seen as vulnerable and in need of more support. Gdynia as a transit node wants, therefore, to extend the Baltic corridor to the north. As well, the participants expressed their main suggestion to the European Commission: To consider the vulnerability of urban areas with “core infrastructure” that do not have the status of a “core urban node”. Gdynia proposes to either group TriCity (Gdynia, Gdansk and Sopot) together as one core urban node or to give Gdynia the status of a core node.
In our project, we talked to representatives of several urban areas with similar problems: as logistic hubs their urban areas suffer from the negative secondary effects that come along with being a major logistic hub. However, without the status of a “core urban node”, they have less funding opportunities to mitigate these effects. Therefore, these urban areas recommend to reconsider how CEF-funding is distributed on the TEN-T and to develop a data-based methodology following the actual freight data.
