Genoa, a future of free public transport
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We will be the first city in Italy to make local public transport free for residents”, including the Navebus, says the mayor of Genoa Marco Bucci who has already begun, just a year ago, the “transition” towards the free service, limited for now to some routes and some time slots. And from the first monitoring findings by Amt, the city’s public transport company, a revolution is already emerging after just four months of experimentation. Every week more than 3,000 cars remain in garages, which correspond to 30 percent of citizens who previously used private vehicles and switched to public ones, with a sixfold increase in passengers.
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In fact, since December 2021 Genoa has begun to make the public transport system free of charge on funiculars and lifts which, in a “vertical” city as the poet Giorgio Caproni defined it, represent an important solution for the many inhabitants of the hilly districts: the top-to-bottom transport, or vice versa, recorded an average increase of passengers of 33 per cent, with an increase on weekdays of 29 per cent and a peak at the weekend, of 44 per cent more. Then there is 25 percent of users who have switched from using the hill bus to the funicular, with double results: moving citizens towards clean mobility and, for the Municipality, less onerous from an economic point of view. In addition to vertical transport, which is already free seven days a week and in every time slot, free experimentation has so far also involved the underground metro network, but only in the less crowded time slots, from 10 to 16 and from 20 to 22. however, recording an average increase in passengers of 20 per cent, which exceeds 33 per cent at the weekend.
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“We are witnessing not only a change among the Genoese in choosing the means of transport, but also a voluntary change in their habits, in order to take advantage of the free public network: to generate the drastic change towards the public transport we want to achieve , it was necessary to apply a shocking solution, outside the box, such as gratuity”, explains the city councilor for Mobility, Matteo Campora. Mayor Bucci and Campora have just announced that this partial gratuity on part of public transport will continue throughout 2023, the year that it will be used by the municipal administration to perfect the economic plan which will allow, by the end of 2024, to make the access to all routes, day and night, and on all types of vehicles for residents. And the Navebus shuttle that connects the city center with the western districts by sea will also be included. For the economic sustainability of the plan, the Municipality needs 70 million a year: “We are identifying some partners and we are moving towards a “congestion charge”, a tax that motorists will pay to enter two or three concentric areas of the city and with which we will partly finance free public mobility”, says Campora.
In the meantime, three large interchange car parks are being planned so that those coming off the motorway, or coming from provincial areas, can leave their car before reaching the city: one for those arriving from the east, one for those “going down” to the city from the north and one for the west. In the meantime, the Municipality is already shifting its entire center of gravity to electric vehicles and is investing in cycle paths and bicycles, even if the orography of Genoa makes it difficult to move around with the latter means. It is no coincidence that Genoa ranks among the top five cities in Italy for the number of electric charging stations, compared to the inhabitants: 314 have been installed since 2018, two have even just been positioned inside the Town Hall building, in via Garibaldi , in order to allow the energy supply for the vehicles of the local police and civic services.
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For the operational implementation of Smart Mobility, the Municipality of Genoa has built a specific office, directed by Valentino Zanin, which also deals with Planning. “The demand for the use of electric car sharing is continuously growing and we are preparing the call for tenders to increase the vehicles and charging stations”, continues Campora. So much so that, in a month, electric scooters will triple in a city, such as Genoa, the capital of Liguria which rises and falls from the first step of the podium in Italy, in the last five years, by number of registered motorcycles. And it is precisely on electric motorcycles that the administration is preparing the turning point: “Following a tender, we have just awarded three contracts to as many operators – he says – who in January will bring the fleet of electric scooters for sharing from 100 to 300 and, when fully operational , up to 750 electric scooters will arrive in the next six months. In the tender for the first time we have included that they are positioned not only in the city center, but that there is a pick-up and drop-off point in each of the nine Municipalities”.
And Genoa is also starting to bet on the bicycle – which has remained in the background until now – as a consequence of the decisive investment by the Municipality in cycle paths: to date, 67 kilometers of routes reserved for bicycles have been created and the Municipality’s plan, by 2024, envisages almost doubling, with another 57 kilometres. And in fact the Corso Italia cycle path has just obtained the mention of “Good practice” in the annual national report Urban ecosystem of Legambiente 2022. And therefore the current 100 bikes reserved for bike sharing, half of which are pedal assisted (precisely for tackle the steep climbs of the city), distributed in sixteen locations in the city centre, by next spring there will be 500, with a clear predominance of assisted pedaling stations, distributed over over fifty locations.
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