Thirty-seven million Italians travel every day. To get to the office, to go to school, to visit family or simply to spend some time in another city, 73% of the population makes an average of 2.6 daily trips (round trips and, in some cases, an extra one) with a total distance covered of 61.4 kilometres. While for those who travel during the week, the number of trips per day amounts to 95 million, the weekend figures are more limited (92 million), although the distances covered rise to 68.4 kilometres. The FS Research Centre, a highly competent centre of the FS Group led by CEO Luigi Ferraris, provides an overview of Italian mobility habits, also thanks to the use of Big Data and in synergy with research bodies and institutes. In particular, through the collaboration with Vodafone Business and the use of mobile phone data, it has been possible to draw up a map of how the transport sector is evolving. This data, which generates up to 30 billion positions every day, is the basis for the processing that the FS Research Center produces through constantly evolving algorithms that allow it to establish how many people travel, where they depart from, their destinations and the distances covered, always with greater precision.
A survey like this allows us not only to study people’s habits, but also to intervene concretely in the transformation needs of the sector. For example, Italians’ mobility choices are evolving towards sustainable solutions and the train, the eco-friendly means of transport par excellence, has become the preferred option for an increasing number of people. In rail transport, at the end of 2023, according to the Observatory of Trends in Passenger and Goods Mobility, high-speed passenger traffic grew by 2% compared to pre-pandemic levels. This figure is even higher if we look at long-distance services such as Intercity and Intercity Notte, for which passenger traffic increased by 10% compared to 2019. The actions that the Italian State Railways are taking to make mobility increasingly greener and promote intermodality are multiple and involve the various companies in the Group, from the Passenger Hub to the Infrastructure Hub, from the Logistics Hub to the Urban Hub. “Rail transport must become the backbone of future mobility, which will be increasingly integrated, intermodal, sustainable and no longer in competition between the various modes, but rather complementary,” says CEO Ferraris. “That is why it is important to plan the work in a coherent and unified way.”
The punctual planning and subsequent justification of projects impacts both passenger and freight transport. The FS Group Passenger Hub offers up to 24,000 national connections per day by train and bus and 13,000 in Europe. 2023 was a record year for Trenitalia: over 500 million travellers, 30 million more than the previous year (+18%). In the first 4 months of the year, 268 million people travelled on board the FS Group Passenger Hub vehicles (+5% compared to 2023), of which 191 million were in Italy. In the same period, Trenitalia transported 150 million travellers who, by travelling by train, generated savings of 700 million euros in environmental and social costs (expenditure on healthcare, environmental damage, agriculture, buildings and biodiversity) and avoided the emission of 900 thousand tonnes of CO2 into the air compared to using a car. The intermodal offer is also growing, with connections to 19 ports and 23 airports, in addition to 12 FRECCIALinks, in connection with Frecce and 159 connections to tourist destinations in connection with Regional trains. Investment expenditure in 2023 exceeded 1.8 billion euros, of which 1.1 billion was earmarked for fleet renewal. In the coming years, increasingly younger, modern and technologically advanced trains will be in circulation. In ten years’ time, the Logistics Hub also intends to give a significant boost to the “modal shift”, significantly increasing the percentage of goods transported by train, which currently stands at 11%, thus becoming a multimodal system operator.
The fundamental step towards achieving this goal is the integration of maritime, road and rail transport, which is necessary to make rail transport the vector for transporting goods over long distances (from 300 kilometres), leaving the so-called first and last mile to road transport. Not least because every truck removed from roads and motorways means fewer tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere. An adequate system is needed to support the movement of passengers and goods. Rete Ferroviaria Italiana, the leading company in the Infrastructure Hub, has in fact launched a strategy to strengthen rail links with airports, promoting intermodality and tourism. The airports of Trieste, Turin Caselle, Rome Fiumicino, Cagliari Elmas, Palermo Punta Raisi, Ancona Falconara, Reggio Calabria and Catania Fontanarossa are currently directly connected to the national rail network managed by RFI. These include Turin airport, while other airports are linked to regional networks or transport systems such as the People Mover, including Milan Malpensa, Milan Linate (with M4 metro connection active from July 2023), Bologna, Pisa, Florence and Bari.
Source: IL Tempo
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
