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

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.