Today, you often need a car if you are going to visit destinations in the countryside. This is a challenge in the environmental impact and sustainability that the municipalities in Western Skaraborg identified a few years ago and now have the opportunity to change.
Lidköping, Skara, Vara, Götene, Essunga and Grästorp together with Varberg municipality and Hjörring municipality in Denmark have been granted 33 million to find solutions for sustainable travel. The project will last for two years starting in 2020.
- We discovered that there were challenges in how to get around our area. We have large streams of visitors in an uneven geography where many people go to visit destinations by car, says Marie Wennerholm, visitor industry strategist in Skara Municipality.
"Sustainable transport options"In a feasibility study that the municipalities did a few years ago, it was seen that 95 per cent of the visitors travel to the visitor destinations by car. Various solutions will now be developed to reduce the environmental impact in the hospitality industry, industry and commerce.
- We will look at smart and sustainable transport opportunities. For example, we have Skara summerland, which is Skara municipality's largest tourist destination, where we will look at how to get there sustainably. Other examples are Lake Hornborgas, the cultural heritage of Varnhem and Läckö Castle, says Marie Wennerholm.
But she does not mean to increase the number of visitors to the municipalities, but should focus on enabling sustainable travel.
- It can be about, for example, electric bicycles between two tourist destinations or how we can get public transport more frequently to reduce private car travel.