Stations: Nodes and Places of Everyday Life

Abstract

This chapter introduces the role of medium-small railway stations within daily mobilities and the conditions that enhance their role in large metropolitan areas characterized by a dispersed demand and mostly oriented towards the use of cars. With the aim of proposing tools for coordinating public accessibility and land uses, the chapter highlights how strengthening the regional railway supply, as done in some Italian regions, could represent also a land-use policy for re-orienting urban settlements and land-use forecast. Starting from a reflection on the outcomes of an investment in upgrading the regional railway service in the Lombardy Region, the chapter proposes a classification of the stations as a useful tool for the construction of scenarios that reorganize land-use forecasts and improve both the accessibility and quality of the services in the stations, in order to widen the catchment areas of each station. The approach combines two methodologies of classification of the stations, both able to enhance the place and node dimensions of each station: the ‘Place-Node model’ (Bertolini 1999) and the ‘TOD index approach’ (Evans and Pratt 2007). The classification of the 104 suburban railway stations provides guidelines for densification around some stations, reorganizing dispersed land-use forecast and improving the quality of the transport connectivity and the railway services.