Ligurian Internal Areas and Demand Responsive Transport: an innovative approach to tackle social exclusion and to re-design sustainable accessibility

Making public transport more flexible, sustainable and efficient has been one the main goals of the last decades for Public Administrations in order to improve urban performances in mobility sector, that is responsible for a big share of pollutant emissions and deeply affects quality life level. Anyway, recently, attention grew on the fact that this topic does not belong to urban areas only and needs tailored measures to be effective: accessibility for peripherical and scarcely populated areas represents the pre-requisite of citizenship rights itself. Basic services (health, education above all) are getting more and more concentrated in order to reduce costs and this means that non-urban residents have to make long trips to reach them. Public Transport itself has become no longer sustainable in these territories because of the small population and low-density levels of transport demand (the so-called “low-demand areas”). That is the reason why flexible and customizable solutions (Demand Responsive Transport-DRT, for instance) could meet the needs of these remote inhabitants, thus improving social inclusion and being the first step to more complex regeneration processes. Italian National Internal Areas Strategy (SNAI) focuses on mobility actions, too. Many flexible transport services have been proposed in order to balance accessibility rights of local residents and economical and environmental sustainability of the service itself. This paper presents the Ligurian Internal Areas experiences (and specifically Antola-Tigullio strategy), where DRT services implementation is currently taking place to tackle marginalization process: referring to these areas non-traditional transport services allow to cover larger areas and longer parts of the day, without adding new costs (service is active only when users need it), thus developing a new mobility scheme.