Northern Beams aims to increase the sustainable mobility across the North Sea by improving the region’s multimodal transport links and logistics solutions. The project will achieve this aim by developing and delivering a comprehensive support programme. This support programme will increase the capacity of the beneficiaries to use the existing multimodal infrastructure and decrease their dependency on road transport for long-distance freight.

Barriers Tackled and Project Approach

Northern Beams will tackle organisational, operational, logistical and service barriers by enabling cooperation amongst ports and transport companies, increasing the logistics capacity of SMEs and providing new ways of promoting multimodal services. The project will build on the region’s existing infrastructure and will support beneficiaries improve their sustainability and competitiveness.

The project will be demand led and will respond to the needs of its beneficiaries with practical solutions that can be implemented cost-effectively in the short term. It will also balance these needs with reducing long-distance road transport by supporting them explore and consider multimodal solutions and the use of more remote and inland ports. The project will bring together universities, SMEs, transport companies, local authorities and ports across the North Sea regions to jointly develop and implement the support programme.

Main Actions

Share best practice examples - The project will gather best practice examples from across its stakeholders. The project will share these examples and jointly determine synergies and what can be learn from them. This will highlight potential improvements and will allow the partners to consider opportunities for new routes, services and business.

Placement programme - The project will develop and coordinate a placement programme that will exchange key staff between relevant partners for up to a week. This action will increase the mutual understanding and cooperation across partners.

Showcase events - The project will design and implement a programme of events across all the participant regions to showcase and promote the services of partner organisations. These events will emphasize exploring more sustainable solutions and assembling efficient multimodal routes linked to the TEN-T Network. Importantly, it will also help with the wider promotion of these services beyond the region.

Training programme - The project will design a training programme that will be delivered through workshops and seminars during the implementation of the project. The project will build on these workshops and seminars to further develop this training programme into e-learning resources that will be made openly available outside the partnership. 

The project’s envisaged outputs are:

• One new improved service that connects the TEN-T Network with a remote or inland intermodal or multimodal hub
• At least 7 SMEs with increased capacity and expertise in logistics that allows them to demand more sustainable multimodal services as a direct result of the project’s intervention
• At least 20 SMEs with a better understanding of how to improve the sustainability of their transport and logistics requirements
• At least two Universities participating in the design and delivery of the training programme
• Increased use of multimodal options by the project partner organisations
• Decreased use of road transport for long-distance freight by the beneficiaries of the project

The project aims to address the need for the North Sea regions to decrease the congestion of their roads and the resulting air and noise pollution. To do so, the regions need to find a way to reduce their use of road transport for long-distance freight. This includes extending the TEN-T network into more remote and inland transport hubs in the North Sea regions. But also these hubs need to offer competitive and efficient multimodal logistics services in order to make this integration viable.

The actions proposed by Northern Beams will highlight potential improvements and new opportunities for multimodal services that will raise awareness of suppliers and users regarding these new options. The project will build on existing infrastructure to provide practical solutions in the short-term decreasing the need for expensive, unaffordable and sometimes unfeasible new infrastructure investment. It will also help inform the decision making process for new investments.

By bringing together the demand and supply side of regional transport and logistics services and demonstrating that they can be successfully balanced by encouraging the use of more sustainable options, the project will be addressing the shared challenge of improving the sustainable multimodal urban mobility of the North Sea Region.

In conversations with UK Local Authority, UK Intermodal Transport Hub, Belgian Local Authority

Universities, Port Authorities, Local Authorities, Logistic and Transport Providers, SMEs with logistic and transport requirements