On a grey February morning in Cela, a village in the Portuguese hinterland, three elderly residents waited by the roadside at five past eight. None of them owned a car and there was no bus coming. Instead, a taxi arrived, collected them, and drove them into town.
Up until four years ago, this would not have been possible. For residents in villages like Cela, a trip to town (to see a doctor, visit family, or do the weekly shopping) required a car they did not have. Public transport is not a feasible option in such a sparsely populated area.
The trip was made possible by Comings and Goings (IR e VIR), a demand-responsive transport service launched by the regional authority in central Portugal. You call the day before, and the next morning a taxi picks you up from your nearest bus stop and takes you into town.
In 2024, Comings and Goings was recognised as an URBACT Good Practice. Six partners are now working to adapt it: Ajuntament del Vendrell (ES), Municipality of Kymi-Aliveri (GR), Jurbarkas District Municipality (LT), Jõelähtme Municipality (EE), the Institute for Spatial Planning of the Šibenik-Knin County (HR), and Tysmenytsia City Council (UA). They share the same structural problem, a dispersed, ageing population with limited access to public transport, but each is working within very different constraints: regulatory frameworks, institutional capacity, and the availability of a local taxi sector.
129 million people across the EU live in areas with poor or no public transport. In most of those places, residents have no realistic alternative to the private car. For those who cannot drive (elderly residents, people with disabilities, young people without means), this means being cut off from healthcare, work, and the social life of nearby towns.
For rural municipalities already operating on stretched budgets, the economics of conventional public transport rarely add up. A bus route serving dispersed settlements carries too few passengers to justify its cost, and still fails to reach the most isolated residents.
The cost of running conventional public transport is why most rural municipalities have none. CIM Viseu Dão Lafões (PT) found a way around it, reallocating budget from bus routes running near-empty.
Unlike a bus route, which costs the same whether it carries one passenger or forty, Comings and Goings only generates a cost when someone books. The annual operating cost for fourteen municipalities is approximately EUR 150 000, now funded as a routine public service line item.
The service runs on 82 taxi companies and more than 110 vehicles across the territory. Drivers are reimbursed at the national taxi rate, and the service scales up or down with demand. CIM Viseu Dão Lafões covers the cost above the EUR 1.50 user contribution.
Since launch, the service has carried more than 50 000 passengers. Residents who might once have reached town monthly are now making the trip several times a week, improving both the quality of life for residents and the activity of town centres.
It took four years and fourteen municipalities to build a service that works. The six partner organisations are now working to find out whether a similar service is achievable in their own contexts.
They range from a compact Catalan municipality of 40 000 people to a Croatian county of nearly 100 000 spread across 2,994 km² of coastline and hinterland. Some, like Jõelähtme Municipality, sit on the edge of a capital city. Others, like Kymi-Aliveri, govern more than 100 settlements across 800 km² of hilly terrain in Greece. Jurbarkas District Municipality borders the Kaliningrad Region in one of Lithuania's most sparsely populated districts. Tysmenytsia City Council is operating under active war.
Both the service and its transfer involve practical obstacles. In Portugal, the first was trust. When the service launched at EUR 1.50 per trip, many residents were sceptical: the price seemed too low to be genuine. Official communications had little effect. What worked was word of mouth through local priests and trusted community figures. Taxi operators also needed convincing: the model asked them to accept pre-booked shared trips at a flat subsidised rate, rather than the individual fares they were used to.
The transfer partners face a harder version of the same challenge. Portugal has a regulated national taxi rate of EUR 0.53 per kilometre, which makes costs predictable. Most partner countries do not, and rates must be negotiated operator by operator. In Jurbarkas and Tysmenytsia, the problem goes further: there is almost no licensed taxi market at all. The service will need to be built from school buses, NGO vehicles, or a municipal fleet. Adapting the model means solving problems the original never faced.
The three residents who waited by the roadside in Cela that February morning needed one thing: a taxi that showed up. CIM Viseu Dão Lafões built a service that delivers exactly that, 50 000 times over, across fourteen municipalities at EUR 1.50 a trip. The URBACT Comings and Goings Network exists to find out whether something equivalent is achievable in six very different contexts: a Croatian county, a Lithuanian district, a Catalan town, a Greek municipality, an Estonian commune on the edge of Tallinn, and a Ukrainian city under active war. After six months of understanding The Good Practice, the network partners will have the next 18 months to adapt and re-use it in their own contexts.
Article by: Robert Jospeh Martin