Research and design by a group of companies to lead to the development of safe and sustainable employee mobility solutions
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In the days of the lockdown, a group of researchers, entrepreneurs, communication and mobility experts (and many others) shared their deep concern that little was being done to try and rethink tools and solutions to manage urban mobility in phase two.
If for health care it was a trauma that had to be dealt with on the run, for other sectors of the public sphere it is different: the lockdown gave (very) little time to prepare.
In the future, certain pillars of our society such as justice, education and services for cultural enjoyment will certainly be affected by major adaptations, but it will be the world of transport and especially local transport (public or concessionary) that will be impacted the most.
The mobility sector is, in fact, the one that is suffering most of all in the world from the Covid-19 crisis. Unlike others, public transport services have had to continue working to ensure that our cities are accessible to all social classes.
A right, that of using ‘public transport’, which is designed to offer equal opportunities, protecting the weakest and safeguarding the environment.
Back in March, the Italian Ministry of Transport had already issued some guidelines for security in transport and logistics, and it is clear, given the little space given to the local transport sector, that the problem was very difficult to address across the board.
While control systems in stations and airports have already been designed and tested because of the risk of terrorism, a capillary control on every single bus, tram or metro is a new subject and requires an ad hoc approach, company by company.
In Italy there are hundreds of operators, often operating at a loss. In the same territory they compete with each other and very few of these companies are structured to cope with the crisis and ‘reconstruction’ at the same time.
Today, according to Ministry instructions, vehicles are entered away from the driver. No tickets are sold or checked on board.
Is this enough to prevent public transport from becoming a breeding ground for contagion?
Some cities, in order to cope with the difficulties of shared transport systems, are developing new cycle paths and adaptations of urban space that can provide an alternative. But the fear is that those who can, will use their cars (Italy in Europe is second only to Luxembourg for the number of cars per thousand inhabitants), those who do not have this privilege will inevitably be pushed further to the margins of society.
Can we imagine the consequences? The empty streets and clean air of quarantine days will be a sad memory in an even sadder future of traffic and unbreathable air. Buses, trams and subways half-empty due to social distancing rules, with the poorest strata of our society in them, will seem useless and then there will be a debate on how to dismantle the service. Low-emission and electric cars will be encouraged, but in order to ensure that everyone can move around safely, older models must also be allowed to circulate. Connections to the suburbs and peri-urban areas will be impossible, ZTLs will no longer make sense, and before long we will be sitting safely in our cars, paralysed in unprecedented traffic and an increasingly divided society. If studies on the correlation between coronavirus and pollution were to be confirmed, the future would be even grotesque.
Already in mid-April, the group of researchers, entrepreneurs, communication and mobility experts (and many others), given the absence of profiles in mobility, architecture or service design within the task force, had proposed to support the national task force by working locally on mobility issues, working alongside public transport companies to help them be more agile, face the very difficult challenges of service management and learn faster.
Italy would need courage to save public transport and defuse the bomb.
The courage to invest in innovation in public, accessible and shared transport systems. The courage to approach public and sustainable mobility as an experience and not simply as an equation between supply and demand.
The courage to finally adopt a contemporary approach to service design, through design, behavioural and communication sciences.
But in continuing the dialogue at the local level with technicians from transport companies and the public administration, many limitations emerged regarding the approach based on the Dpcm.
As was easy to imagine, general guidelines on such a complex subject are useless and, in trying to follow the regulatory ping pong, very few have done the thing that would seem most obvious: ask the citizens locally.
Everyone, in fact, will choose how to get around according to their own needs, their own perception of risk, their own concept of convenience. And everyone, under the right conditions, could accept alternatives to the private car.
The more than forty signatories of the letter to the task force, with the collaboration of the Office of Urban Resilience of the City of Milan, have therefore launched an online survey to build profiles of behaviour, propensity to change and thus better target efforts to redesign the urban mobility experience. In parallel, thanks to Izi, a company specialised in opinion polls, the same research was focused on two specific contexts: Milan and Turin.
The first nationwide survey was launched on 23 April, through which we collected more than 1,600 responses. The data are open and can be consulted at this link.
The analysis (main data here) confirms concerns about a lower propensity to use public transport, but that does not automatically translate into confinement to the private car. In fact, a propensity to move more on foot, by bike, bike-sharing, car-pooling, company shuttles and car-sharing emerges.
And, under the right conditions, public transport is not a priori excluded from the possibilities either.
Izi’s research on Turin and Milan partly confirmed the initial results and added very interesting details on the specificities of the two urban contexts. It emerges once again that the will of citizens is not to lock themselves in their private cars. In Turin, one of Italy’s metropolitan cities with the highest concentration of cars per inhabitant, citizens believe they can even reduce their car use by 4.6%.
Instead, there is a tendency to prefer individual forms of micro-mobility, both private and shared, provided they are provided with dedicated and safe incentives and routes.
Even public means of transport, despite a physiological loss of confidence, are not excluded a priori, provided they are arranged in such a way as to guarantee passengers a sanitised environment and adequate distances.
The data collected show that, in both cities analysed, the means chosen to travel to work is directly related to the infrastructure and services in the vicinity of the workplace.
With regard to smart working, on the other hand, it is confirmed that half of the workers could easily continue to follow the habits of these quarantine months. It is now up to the most enlightened HR managers and executives to introduce the appropriate tools, overcoming the often cultural barriers that delay their inclusion. Particular attention must also be paid to the school context. In fact, in the two cities, around 34% of those interviewed have children of school age . This shows that intervening in schools with awareness-raising initiatives can bring indirect benefits to large sections of the population.
And if the lockdown has changed our perception of urban space and our propensity to use mobility systems, the figure measured in terms of environmental impact during the months of the lockdown is certainly of historic importance.
Indeed, it is estimated that in the first days of April, CO2 emissions decreased by 17 per cent compared to those recorded in the same time frame in 2019. The average annual growth of +1% has thus been drastically reversed, returning to 2006 levels. Overall, the road transport sector contributed the most (43%) to the reduction in emissions.
Beware, however, because at the end of the year, emissions compared to the whole of 2019 should be ‘only’ 4% lower. Moreover, history teaches us that after every major economic crisis, emissions tend to soar again (-1.4% in 2009 and +5.1% in 2010). Combined action by governments is needed so that the recovery from the current crisis also takes environmental variables into account: the reduction of CO2 emissions must become structural and driven by better policies.
It therefore seems that the ‘demand for mobility’ is ready for change and that this is precisely the right time to invest boldly in sustainable mobility systems.
And it also seems that decision makers (Government and Ministry of Transport) are looking for systems and solutions to incentivise sustainable mobility by making public and private entities responsible and favouring the synergy between the offer of mobility services and the infrastructure available on the territory.
Trying to summarise, the general strategy on mobility contained in the Relaunch Decree issued by the government envisages the introduction of Mobility Managers (figures within companies with the task of drawing up a plan to facilitate the sustainable mobility of their employees) even in companies with 100 employees and with the obligation to present the Home-Work Travel Plan every year by December.
The decree also envisages that the transport companies, thanks to an initial injection of liquidity of about 500 million euros (to cover the losses of these months), guarantee frequent means, possible modal changes and acceptable waiting times, and that the municipalities, through the Area Mobility Managers, coordinate the matching between supply (transport services) and demand (all citizens) registered by the Mobility Managers of companies, public bodies and schools…
The attempt is therefore to rationalise the problem, measure it by mapping the Mobility Managers of entities, companies, universities (a figure introduced more than 20 years ago with the inter-ministerial decree of 27 March 1998 – Decreto Ronchi) and schools (a figure introduced through Law 221 of 28 December 2015 art. 5 paragraph 6), and solve it through various measures that can be adapted to different contexts (e.g.: staggered entry and exit times, remote working and blended learning plans, ad hoc mobility services for specific targets or to serve inland areas, etc.).
But this strategy, however sensible, runs the risk of clashing with reality.
It would be enough to talk to any Italian company with more than a hundred employees, or to a school, a public body, to discover that appointing a Mobility Manager to develop the Home-Work Travel Plan is the least of their thoughts.
Whereas it would be enough to talk to any Mobility Manager to discover that since 1998 their companies have rarely put them in a position to do their job well.
A chat in the municipality and with public transport companies, on the other hand, would make it immediately obvious that they are overwhelmed by events and often paralysed by political/bureaucratic stalemates…
In short, Mobility Managers are called upon to play a leading role in rethinking mobility in Italy, but in reality they do not exist (except on paper and for companies that have to comply with ISO 14001).
But then how do we move from words to deeds?
Some of the companies present among the signatories of the project, including MUV, GreenShare, IZI and Ghella, have launched the “Mobility Management Post Covid” project to develop simple, free and collaborative processes that can guide as many companies as possible to develop solutions for the safe and sustainable mobility of their employees. A “Wiki” has already been online for several weeks, containing the first methods, tools and examples that can support corporate mobility managers and mobility service operators in this unprecedented challenge.
But however useful the attempt is, without direct interest and above all without effective support from public institutions it will be very difficult for companies, schools and public bodies to activate and coordinate autonomously. Yet there is already a preliminary study recently published by the Polytechnic of Milan which underlines, with a view to returning to school and the office in September, the emergency of the situation and how this can only be defused through shared action through the use of Mobility Managers.
And there are also examples of public policies that have supported the activation of these figures in an organic way, as for example the metropolitan city of Turin did some time ago through a dedicated office, or as the Puglia Region is committed to doing precisely in these days and precisely to deal with the covid crisis.
The hope is therefore that in the next ministerial decree the methods and above all the resources (both in economic and support terms) made available to support the investigation, synthesis and negotiation activities of the new heroes of Italian mobility will be described.