During this mobility week we also would like to raise awareness on the EU funds available for research and innovation projects. You might not know, but for many years EU money has co-funded research teams to develop new modes of transport in our cities: whether we are talking about intelligent transport systems such as connected or automated vehicles, energy efficient green cars or smart services provided through mobile applications, all these and much more innovative ideas are being developed in European projects. In fact, investing in innovation in this field offers European companies a huge commercial opportunity for the future: According to the European Commission , products and services related to sustainable mobility will represent a global market of €300bn in 2020.
For about twenty years the main EU financing instrument for research and development projects were the Framework Programmes (FP), which came to an end last year with FP7. If you would like to have an idea of projects funded, look at the TRIP Web Portal which includes description of thousands of transport projects carried out in Europe.
Since 2014, Horizon 2020 , the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever, takes over with a total budget of nearly €80bn euros to be spent by 2020. Under it, ‘Transport Challenge’ has been allocated a budget of over €6bn for the period 2014-2020, (or about 8% of Horizon’s 2020 total budget).
If you are a researcher, you might be interested to know about what type of projects are eligible for funding , or look at current projects stories highlighted: a few examples include V-CHARGE (a new driverless car parking system), INGAS (improved performance in natural gas fuelled cars), WIDE-MOB (a small electric car) or the EBSF project (a new intelligent bus system).
