Travel by car, Milan and Turin the cities where they decreased the most – Corriere.it

Thanks to smart working, integrated due to the pandemic, and the expensive petrol, which characterized a large part of last year, Italians have decreased the use of the car. Between 2019 and 2022, road trips decreased by 12%. what emerges from the report DataMobility2023 – Think Big: data at the center of the debate, elaborated by GO-Mobility, a consultancy company for mobility and transport planning.

The cities with the greatest reduction

The analysis was carried out taking as reference the data of an anonymous sample of 484,000 cars and 80 million trips for 2019 and 512,000 cars and 79 million trips for 2022. The data used comes from the 14 metropolitan cities scanned by the Floating Car Data (FCD), from the black boxes of cars equipped with GPS capable of providing useful and detailed information on journeys and accidents. Turin, Milan, Bologna and Florence are the cities that see the greatest reduction in both travel (between -22% and -18%) and car journeys in relation to the municipal area (-19.6% and -11.3 %). Rome, on the other hand, is the place with the longest average length of trips, due to its size and the lack of alternative systems to the car over medium distances. The case of Cagliari is relevant, where almost 7 trips out of 10 are less than 5 km, a distance that can potentially be covered by bicycle or scooter.

Travel times

Naples, Turin and Palermo are the cities with the highest traffic volumes in relation to the municipal area: due to their widespread urbanisation, they suffer most from the negative impacts caused by the circulation of cars. The share of short trips decreases in all cities: from -6.6% in Messina to -1.7% in Turin, while that of long journeys increases. The average speed of urban travel has increased in all cities, a sign that congestion has decreased. A journey in Naples takes place on average at 18 km/h (+8%), while in Rome at 25 km/h (+4.5%). Already in the present, new technologies allow us to obtain an unprecedented detail of our cities – said Daniele Mancuso, CEO of GO-Mobility – and unprecedented habits, something that traditional survey systems are unable to produce. This analysis draws attention to the potential of big data to understand people’s increasingly complex and heterogeneous lifestyles.

The new “normal”

Which are the Italian centers, on the other hand, that have a greater dependence on the car? Also in this context, the divergence between North and South is accentuated: in Palermo, Messina and Reggio Calabria, for example, each car is used on average almost every day, a figure slightly decreased compared to 2019 (between -5% and -3 %). On the contrary, Milan, Bologna and Florence, which already showed a lower dependence on the private vehicle in 2019, are the cities that are now recording the highest decreases (between -15% and -8%). The curiosity that emerges from GO-Mobility’s research is that since after the pandemic, which has brought habits such as smart working, a new normality of travel methods is also born. Times in the city do not change, where peak hours remain the same, despite the reduction in travel, but the days change: Monday is the day in which the greatest drop is highlighted (-18%) making it very similar to the drop that characterized pre-pandemic Fridays.