From its beginning, COVID-19 pandemic has brought huge changes in our daily life by impacting not only many industrial areas, from which the transport and logistics sector was not excluded, but also any activity related to it. European projects have been a clear example and MultiAPPRO project was one of them. The project was the first call of the Interreg ADRION project that started in 2018 and finished in 2021 due to the drastic situation caused by COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences, such as the global lockdown. Numerous activities within MultiAPPRO project have been interrupted and, unfortunately, not promoted as partners wished. Yet, thanks to the EU Commission, who decided to co-fund the project once again, partners got the opportunity to capitalise the results in the new project call under MultiAPPRO PLUS name.
MultiAPPRO PLUS project is a six-month project with the specific objective to enhance capacity for integrated transport and mobility services and multimodality in the Adriatic-Ionian area. In order to achieve the above-mentioned objective, MultiAPPRO PLUS partners aimed at promoting freight transport logistics, strived to make intermodal transportation more competitive and put maritime freight transport on equal footing with other transport modes. These goals should be achieved through the capitalisation of results achieved in the MultiAPPRO project, such as the enlargement of the already established Intermodal Transport Network; the realisation of Port of Bar pilot action, who developed a mobile phone application based on the results of bottlenecks analysis; the promotion of MultiAPPRO outputs such as SSS and MoS promotion action plan and Transport Performance Strategy.
All the 7 project partners, coming from five different countries, worked together towards their main goal – promotion of intermodal transport in the Europe. During the project life, partners organised 5 national events and the Intermodal Transport Network (ITN) meeting, where partners and different stakeholders met once again to discuss actual transport problems. The meeting was a great opportunity to exchange new ideas and knowledge with stakeholders from different transport branches in the post COVID-19 era. As leading partner, KIP (Intermodal Transport Cluster) hopes that the achievements may be of help for people working in the transport sector and its supply chain.