Sustainable accessibility and mobility are a pre-condition for the achievement of the EU goal to cut 90% of the transport carbon emission by 2050, but also for better quality of life to tackle depopulation and to retain a more polycentric and balanced territorial structure. Classically, transport policies in rural and peripheral areas are built around the car, aiming at stronger European integration and socio-economic and territorial cohesion, but paradoxically evidences increasingly show that this leads to a growing urban polarization and rural depopulation. Countermeasures focus on car-oriented development coupled with expansions of built-up surfaces (housing, industry, etc.), leading to sprawling land use and disabling high quality of living that urban residents can enjoy, and to more carbon emissions. Sometimes it leaves existing assets less or hardly desterilized, e.g., railway infrastructure. This vicious cycle is a cumulative result of problem-solving set only around cars, with sustainable means of transport, namely public transport (PT), and walking and cycling as stand-alone and PT access modes put on the fringe. While SUMPs help even small cities to break this cycle, this remains a key challenge in rural and remote regions. PT needs to be a backbone for sustainable transport not only in cities but in rural and peripheral regions. To this end, NUTSHELL@CE focuses on this challenge by focusing on the following three PT related specific challenges in Central Europe: A) Integrated multimodal access to main public transport corridors is another key to making PT a chosen mode of travel. Accessibility to PT stations/stops has been typically conceptualized around walking; however, such infrastructure has been often “forgotten” in car-oriented development in rural areas of Central Europe. New access-egress option are becoming available, such as micro e-mobility (e.g. e-bikes), but it has not yet been much explored. B) Systematization of rural/regional PT services with network-wide clock face timetable (ITF - Integraler Taktfahrplan in German or Rendezvous in French): this is a strong measure to make PT chosen a mobility option as demonstrated e.g., in Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands. However, many PT services of the CE region are still far from this. C) Public transport missing links and incoherent catchment areas still exist. Such gaps exit due to, for example, covered area by public transport systems that has grown historically, two different system that has grown separately (e.g. national and rural network), rapid change of settlement patterns incurring increase of cross-border trips after the fall of Iron Curtain and Expansion of the EU.