From infrastructure to service: mapping long-distance passenger transport in Italy†

Abstract

In order to promote an effective level of coordination between physical investments, technology and soft policies in transport planning, a deep knowledge of supply and demand is desirable, if not necessary. Unlike other countries, the national scale of supply and demand for the Italian transport systems as a whole is barely known and in the case of long-distance mobility, there is not a unique quantitative and geographical description available. In this paper, we present a map regarding the Italian long-distance transport supply and generalised cost simulations, for the period 2013–2014. The information shown in the map comes from a multimodal transport model, which presents the peculiarity of using real public service timetables to simulate the entirety of the Italian long-distance transport industry. This tool enables one to map the entire transport supply and to estimate the generalised costs among any route: this also allows one to identify which transport mode is better suited to make a specific trip.