Marco Mazzarino

The various social, political, environmental, and economical mega-trends together with the rapid rise of digitalization are shaping cities worldwide including the way that citizens and products move within the urban environment. New mobility services are popping up which are showing the path toward more on-demand and personalized mobility patterns. The transformation of the urban mobility environment though constitutes a great challenge for policy-makers, as little is known about the impact of these trends on the city’s current mobility environment while the assessment of the future state of a mobility system can be considered a quite complex process taken its multi-parametric and multi-dimensional nature. This paper aims to simplify this process by presenting a coherent multi-actor consequence analysis framework as a tool for assessing future mobility scenarios which was developed in the framework of the H2020 SPROUT. This paper presents in detail the main components of this framework together with the list of key performance indicators used for assessing the performance in terms of sustainability of future mobility scenarios as well as indicative results from its use by the city of Padua.

Big data technologies offer new opportunities for the port and maritime industry in both freight and passengers transport. In order to ensure the success of a new big data project in a specific environment, it is essential to assess the benefits and the efforts required by its implementation. The present work addresses this topic for a specific area: the Adriatic region. Several relevant stakeholders from the selected area have been inquired to assess the relevance and deployment difficulties for a set of promising big data technologies. The study provides a picture of the current state and the future outlook for the Adriatic region, being useful for local operators and a valuable example to be replicated in other contexts.

Currently, remarkable gaps of operational, social and environmental efficiency and overall sub-optimization of the logistics and mobility systems exist in urban areas. There is then the need to promote and assess innovative transport solutions and policy-making within SUMPs (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans) to deal with such critical issues in order to improve urban sustainability. The paper focuses on the case study of the Venice Lagoon, where islands—despite representing a relevant feature of urban planning—face a tremendous lack of accessibility, depopulation, social cohesion and they turn out to be poorly connected. By developing an original scenario-building methodological framework and performing data collection activities, the purpose of the paper consists of assessing the feasibility of a mixed passenger and freight transport system —sometimes called cargo hitching. Mixed passenger and freight systems/cargo hitching are considered as an innovative framework based on the integration of freight and passenger urban systems and resources to optimize the existing transport capacity, and thus, urban sustainability. Results show that the overall existing urban transport capacity can accommodate urban freight flows on main connections in the Lagoon. The reduction in spare public transport capacity, as well as in the number (and type) of circulating freight boats show—in various scenarios—the degree of optimization of the resulting urban network configuration and the positive impacts on urban sustainability. This paves the way for the regulatory framework to adopt proposed solutions.