Sustainable mobility

Environment, social equity, financial feasibility

The public administration decision makers can act on the system of mobility of people and goods by implementing a variety of infrastructural interventions, technology and management in sustainable ways. The mobility system must be sustainable from an economic efficiency, environmental and equity perspective.

Every action produces its effects by changing the demand for transport as user choices, such as the destination, the mode of transport and the itinerary, are conditioned by supply attributes. The structure of the traffic flow that is established on the networks determines the impact of interventions: travel time with its congestion phenomenon, pollutant emissions, energy consumption and accident rates. The distribution of impacts on different categories of users, on citizens and economic assets located in the territory, determines a political judgment of fairness. The interventions are judged both on the perspective of sustainability, and based on the criteria for financial, technical, political, administrative and legal viability.

The CTL activity in the field of sustainable mobility is aimed at providing policy makers with the necessary technical and scientific support in the different phases of the policy making process, i.e. the development of decision-making policies.

Activities include the level of research, developed under Italian and European research programs, and the application in cases of interest to public, local, national and European purchasers. CTL has participated in the drafting of the National Mobility Plan, completed in 2012, and coordinated the Mobility, Transport and Logistics Plan of the Lazio region, which is currently treating the update.

In the activities, it is made use both of proven methodologies that represent the state of the art of the discipline, and specifically developed ad-hoc approaches to the purpose of the case study. The methodological aspects are the subject of research in order to compare alternative approaches and to offer original and innovative contributions compared to the state. Some of this research has resulted in publications in international journals. For the conduct of the activities dedicated software are used, in part commercially available and partly developed in-house.

The activities can be grouped into four thematic areas:

• the analysis of the mobility policy;
• analysis of transport demand;
• ex-ante assessments;
• the benchmarking analysis.

Analysis of the mobility policy. The aims are the formulation and analysis of policies at local, national and international level. This includes infrastructural and technological policies, such as new road links and ITS, and managerial policies, such as regulation and pricing. The activities are based on the compilation and analysis of the results obtained by both the trial and the application on a large scale, and of model predictions. The aspects covered include the factors of success and failure, the assessment of cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis, the views of the various stakeholders involved, the barriers to the introduction, the transferability to other contexts. Currently CTL contributes to the development of Eltis, the portal that provides information on policies in the field of urban mobility in Europe. Eltis is an initiative of the Directorate General for Mobility and Transport of the European Commission.

Analysis of transport demand. The objectives are the development and application of discrete choice models to examine and predict user behavior. The activities include the design and execution of the revealed preference and stated preference surveys type, and the formulation and calibration of random utility models that allow you to make predictions on the demand and to derive monetary values of time and other attributes of the shift. Applications include the choice of mode of transport, route, type of vehicle. One of the areas of specialization of the CTL regards the analysis of user preferences for unconventional modes of transport, especially the road public transport systems with automatic drive subjected for several years to research and experiments in Europe. The Center also conducts research valuation surveys contingent of the willingness to pay of the users.

Ex-ante assessments. The purposes are the development and analysis application capable of reaching a judgment of convenience of one or more actions based on a set of goals. The principal methodology regards the cost-benefit analysis, which is able both to deliver the judgment on the economic viability of a single incident, and to order sets of interventions. An area subject of research is related to the evaluation methodologies of user benefits. The multi-criteria analysis, however, can be used to order sets of interventions, have the advantage of not requiring the monetization of all effects and are therefore more flexible with respect to the set of objectives in order to which the assessment is conducted. The multi-criteria methods used include analysis based on value functions (MAVT, multi-attribute value theory), which is now established as Europe-wide standards, and hierarchical analysis (AHP, analytic hierarchy process), of American tradition.

Benchmarking analysis. The objectives are the development and application of benchmarking to evaluate the performance of transport systems at different geographical scales. The comparative study on a sample of cases of the different transport systems including, for example, the urban transport system, allows to explain the different paths and the reasons for their success and failure, to identify the so-called best practices and related implementation issues. The benchmarking analysis provides indications on how to obtain performance improvements based on lessons learned from best practices.