Abstract

In Europe and in Italy the guidelines of transport policies are deeply changing. In fact, besides the traditional goal of improving the levels of accessibility of territories, and thus improving transport connections to reduce transfer time of both people and goods, new sustainability goals emerge for sector policies, in particular related to the necessity of limiting the negative impacts of mobility on the system, such as pollution, congestion, accidents, the direct costs of infrastructures and 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 transport on the one hand, and the abnormal recourse to individual means of transport on the other hand, amplify the emergencies linked to the sustainability of local transport models, without providing a satisfactory answer to the traditional question of the accessibility to and from urban areas. This paper offers a systematic quantitative and qualitative reading of current dynamics in passenger transport in the South, particularly in metropolitan areas, highlighting the differential positioning with the areas of central and northern Italy as well as with European ones, and offers some recommendations in this regard for policies to be implemented in part by respecting the budgetary constraints with which all government departments, at different territorial levels, must confront. In particular, it suggests four guidelines for sector policies in the view of territorial sustainability: strengthening the levels of programming and planning of urban transport policies, 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, both enhancing the quantitative levels of supply (capillarity, frequency of service), and working on the efficiency of these services (an increase of business productivity, rationalization of service networks, development of the intermodal integration and info on mobility, etc.).