"Green roads give latvians the opportunity to travel around their homeland and do it in the fresh air, healthy and epidemiologically safe.

It is an opportunity to create new cycling connections for tourism and daily mobility needs," said The Minister of Transport Talis Linkaits at the conference "Green Roads in Vidzeme – Tourism and Mobility" today.The Minister stressed the importance of multimodality so that citizens can move easily and safely between populated areas of Latvia, combining different modes of transport , including by foot, bicycle and public transport." In Latvia, we plan to create multimodality with the development of a public transport network based on railway as the "backbone". It is planned to transform railway stations into mobility points where passengers can easily transfer, for example, from train to bus or arrive at their destination on their own bicycle. It is important to promote the micromobility of the population – movement by bicycles, scooters, walking," said Talis Linkaits.Linkaits continued that "the public transport service must become more modern. Now people are more likely to choose to buy tickets electronically – they can already buy not only one ticket, but also a month ticket electronically. Stations should be easily accessible not only to motorists, but also to pedestrians. Importantly, the timetables for the region's traffic with the city have been agreed so that a person can easily transfer from one transport to another. A single ticket is currently being developed. In the European Railway Year, despite the ongoing repairs at Riga Central Station and the limited number of train compositions, we will try to expand train traffic by offering additional opportunities in the direction of Madona and Gulbene."" I expect the first significant improvement in the quality of rail transport to be the arrival of new electric trains next year. The next step is the reconstruction of 48 stations and stop platforms and the improvement of platforms based on uniform principles. Currently, work invisible to the general public is taking place both on the sequence of transformation of the railway infrastructure of the Riga hub, on the principles of transportation of non-electrified lines and preparation of the purchase of battery trains, on many improvements in the Pierīga range within the Framework of the Renewal and Resilience Mechanism, as well as on the management of the Rail Baltica infrastructure and the inclusion of regional stations in the common Transport System of Latvia," said the Minister of Transport.