CITEAIR - Common Information to European Air

Introduction
The development of Europe´s urban centres is in many ways linked with the development of sustainable mobility options. Changes in behaviour, economic growth or recession and structure of the population are factors that have an immediate impact on transport and mobility patterns. Cities and regions are the place where the most complex challenges in transport and environment need to be solved.

Air quality has unquestionably adverse effects on human health. Because the dominant source of environmental impacts in most urban areas is traffic, local and regional authorities must find efficient and integrated solutions for their environmental and traffic problems to increase the quality of life for its citizens. The pressure on European cities and regions to implement the related EU regulations on air quality has led to a multitude of initiatives to develop a concrete sustainability perspective, which compromises between environmental quality and economic growth.

However, the absence of a common approach for the implementation of these regulations has led to isolated solutions which requires an initiative for a) developing better solutions, b) more efficient solutions, c) solutions which go beyond the obligations of the related EU directives, d) creating synergies and e) sharing the know-how, knowledge and experiences.

The INTERREG IIIC programme – through which the CITEAIR Project is co-financed — offers excellent opportunities to stimulate the co-operation among European cities and regions regarding sustainable transport.

The core cities Leicester (UK), Paris (FR), Prague (CZ), Rotterdam (NL), Rome (I) and most of the fol-lower cities Munich (DE), Coventry (UK), den Hague (NL), Bratislava (SK) and Brussels (BE) have a solid base of previous and ongoing work in the area of transport and environmental management, as part of their efforts to obtain sustainable development for their regions. In most of the cities there exists poli-cies, an infrastructure of hardware and software tools, an excellent knowledge about environmental effects and appropriate abatement methods.

The region of Emilia-Romagna Region (I) will also be involved in the project as a Transfer Region, where better environmental and traffic solutions are required. Here, the knowledge and experiences of the core cities will be transferred.

The overall objectives of CITEAIR are:

to jointly develop better and more efficient solutions for assessing the impact of traffic on air quality in large urban areas using Information Society Technologies,
to inform professional users and the public on the environmental situation based on common guidelines and
to give guidance on efficient measures to abate adverse environmental situations through close co-operation, experience exchange and joint developments with European Cities and Regions.