Overview of the bus network characteristics in the Italian medium size urban areas

Abstract

Public transport services represent one of the main solutions for promoting a more sustainable urban mobility system but, in many Italian urban areas, there are still many critical issues about the level and quality of offered services. Starting from such issues, amplified by the pandemic condition, the present paper deals with the systematic analysis of the bus network characteristics and riderships in many Italian cities and towns, characterized by a supply of public transport services mainly based on buses. The database built for the study is related to 54 municipalities, with a population from 80,000 to 360,000 inhabitants, and it is composed by a large set of indicators about supply and demand of the bus services network and of the territorial characteristics of the municipalities. The results of the analysis permit to underline the existence of very different condition about level of provided services, impacting on the level of demand using the public transport. These differences are not only related to the territorial characteristics but are also due to completely different characteristics of the supply. The urban areas of Northern Italy, seem to present, in almost all of the analyzes carried out, both a quantity and quality level of the supply provided, as well as the level of demand satisfied, clearly superior to both urban areas of Central and Southern Italy. Finally, the study proposes a new method for the estimation of the overall annual level of bus services, for overcoming the limits of the existing models, hardly dependent on the historical expenditure criterion. The new method is based on the identification of the effective transport needs and the robustness and availability of the input data.