Rostock took a big step towards multimodal mobility. On Monday, 11th May, the City celebrated the opening of the first three mobility points, combining car sharing and cargo bike sharing.

After two years of concept development and planning, in May 2020 the City opened the first three mobility points, called “mobilpunkt”. Located in the densely populated city centre, the mobility points provide space for car sharing and the brand new cargo bike sharing system HRO-BIKE that was introduced. An info stela of 3,8m height provides information on the available mobility offers at the mobility point and in the surrounding area.

With these new mobility points, the City of Rostock wants to facilitate the interchange between different sustainable transport modes and aims to encourage multimodal travel behaviour. Whenever possible, they are located close to public transport stops for bus and tram. A further objective is to promote the sharing idea: ‘using’ instead of ‘owning’ transport solutions as a good alternative to private car ownership. Making cargo bikes and cars available for sharing can help to reduce car ownership rate and the parking pressure in dense inner-city quarters.

These three mobility point pilots are realized in the frame of the EU project “cities.multimodal” funded through the Interreg Baltic Sea Region programme. They are the result of a long learning process and intensive exchange with other cities in the Baltic Sea Region and Europe that was possible thanks to the European funding. In the next years, the City of Rostock aims to develop a city-wide network of mobility points based on the experiences from this project.

Author: Mrs. Lisa Wiechmann, Hanseatic City of Rostock, staff unit mobility management, project coordinator EU BSR project cities.multimodal