From large railway routes to urban transport. This is the new challenge presented by the CEO of Ferrovie dello Stato, Renato Mazzoncini, at the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio: “More efficient urban mobility is worth 12 billion in savings, or about one point of GDP, which is a lot. And the municipal companies are no longer able to guarantee the service, especially from the point of view of the networks".
Fs knows something about networks, given that it manages almost 17 km of them throughout Italy, while the urban experiment began with a relative majority shareholding (37%) in Metro 5 in Milan, the one built more recently with an investment of 1,4 billion, which they would like to replicate to bring it up to Monza. “We are ready to invest to complete the infrastructure”, assures Mazzoncini who also points out how much there is a need to extend the metro network throughout Italy: “In Italy we have a total of 234 km of metro lines, less than Madrid alone which has 290. In Istanbul they have designed 800 km of them, of which 500 have already been built”. In Italy there are only 3,8 km of underground network per million inhabitants.
The new challenge starts from a premise: margin to operate on a service, especially from an infrastructural point of view, lacking, and the absolute need to adapt the 14 Italian metropolitan cities to European standards. We are currently able to connect Milan with cities such as Turin, Brescia, Bologna and from 2021 with the third pass also Genoa in a maximum of one hour: these cities constitute a mega metropolitan area of 15 million people and are tens and hundreds of km apart. In the city, on the other hand, you travel on average for only 4-5 km and it takes the same amount of time, that is an hour if all goes well: twice as long as Paris, Berlin, London or Madrid”.
The gap could be filled, with the right interventions, in 3-5 years according to Mazzoncini. And according to the study presented by the Ambrosetti think tank The European House, it would make it possible to save as much as 12 billion euros a year. Currently Italy, and in particular its 14 metropolitan cities which constitute its benchmark from the point of view of public transport, is bringing up the rear: 86,4% of urban motorized journeys take place with individual mobility and only 16,6% with collective means. In Paris, individual means are 69,3%, in London 52,6%, in Berlin 44%. Not only that: Italy is the only country in which public transport is overwhelmingly on road (65%) compared to rail, while the European figure is 50/50 and in France that on road is only 34% of the total. Finally, individual transport costs Italians more than 140 billion a year.
“But neither is it just a question of costs – explains Mazzoncini -. As the example of teaches us Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, which made public transport free, but only increased it by 13%. It's not a bad result, but in proportion to what it cost, one would have expected a boom. It demonstrates that before being cheap, the service must above all be efficient, as happens in London where, in fact, getting around on the underground isn't cheap but everyone does it”.
The models are therefore those of London, Paris, and above all Berlin, which has focused on the polycentrism of the city, on mobility by bicycle and on the integration of the transport network with suburban areas. Then there are the capital cities like Stockholm and Amsterdam which are also champions of green mobility also through disincentives to individual mobility. Precisely for this reason Ferrovie is also looking at investment opportunities abroad: "In the Netherlands - said the CEO of FS - we have just taken over Qbuzz, the third local public transport operator (Utrecht and Groningen-Drenthe areas) for 30 million . Starting from 2025, the Netherlands will no longer register public vehicles that are not electric".
