Hans Rat presented Ruslan Kramarenko, Deputy Minister of Housing and Municipal Services of Ukraine, with UITP's Dresden Declaration on the importance of keeping and upgrading long established tramway systems.

AN INTERNATIONAL conference on problems of modernisation and sustainable development of city electric transport systems was held in Yalta, Ukraine on 7-11 October. The conference was co-organised by the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Services of Ukraine and UITP’s Eurasian Division, and was accompanied by an exhibition of Ukrainian manufacturers and service providers.

The event brought together some 150 participants mainly from Ukraine but also from Germany, Austria, Russia, the United Kingdom, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Czech Republic, South Korea, Kazakhstan and Poland.

UITP Secretary General Hans Rat focused his speech on the need to maintain and develop the existing electric transport systems in cities, and gave convincing examples on how the local transport systems in London, Barcelona, Seoul and Bogota were recently modernised.  

The conference programme included presentations of public transport operators, suppliers and manufacturers as well as authorities from national and local levels.