Urban and metropolitan transport in the South of Italy

In Europe and in Italy the guidelines of transport policies are deeply changing.In fact, besides the traditional goal of improving the levels of accessibilityof territories, and thus improving transport connections to reduce transfer timeof both people and goods, new sustainability goals emerge for sector policies,in particular related to the necessity of limiting the negative impacts of mobilityon the system, such as pollution, congestion, accidents, the direct costs of infrastructuresand service production. In the light of these new strategic perspectives,the position of the metropolitan areas of the South is particularly critical:the shortage of networks and services for the urban and metropolitan transporton the one hand, and the abnormal recourse to individual means of transporton the other hand, amplify the emergencies linked to the sustainability of localtransport models, without providing a satisfactory answer to the traditional questionof the accessibility to and from urban areas. This paper offers a systematicquantitative and qualitative reading of current dynamics in passenger transportin the South, particularly in metropolitan areas, highlighting the differential positioningwith the areas of central and northern Italy as well as with Europeanones, and offers some recommendations in this regard for policies to be implementedin part by respecting the budgetary constraints with which all governmentdepartments, at different territorial levels, must confront. In particular, itsuggests four guidelines for sector policies in the view of territorial sustainability:strengthening the levels of programming and planning of urban transportpolicies, the strong selection of infrastructure interventions favouring rail systems(even at the urban level), the development of measures of regulation and pricing(of «demand management») and the upgrading of public transport services, bothenhancing the quantitative levels of supply (capillarity, frequency of service), andworking on the efficiency of these services (an increase of business productivity,rationalization of service networks, development of the intermodal integrationand info on mobility, etc.).