Green mobility: Cities as a laboratory for tomorrow’s mobility

According to the most recent report by the Clean Cities Campaign, metropolitan mobility is responsible for 23% of total climate-changing gas emissions, while European cities 'hold the key to leading Europe towards a healthy climate and environmentally friendly mobility'.

While some argue emissions from transport – particularly private transport – are not the main source of air pollution in a general sense, it is true that cities are suffocating: the acceptable air quality standards are regularly exceeded in more than a hundred cities.

Air quality is significantly affecting people's health. It is probably the topic most easily understood by the public when it comes to cities and traffic. Our research finds eight in ten Italians say they are concerned about the effect of pollution on health, while this figure rises to almost nine in ten among Milanese and Neapolitans.

Less obvious, however, is the fact that vehicles consume more space than people: this can be deduced by combining a series of data from the Sustainable Mobility Observatory of Legambiente and Ipsos. Against a backdrop of suffering from excessive traffic – and in some large cities more than in the rest of the country – annoyance is evident at the additional consumption of space linked to double parking or, worse, parking in areas designated for pedestrians, such as pavements.

And in this lies an apparent contradiction but one closely linked to the car-centric design of the city and the current mentality that clamours for more parking spaces, like 45% of respondents we interviewed in Milan. The fact that 60,000 cars per 100,000 inhabitants take up expensive urban space by remaining parked 95% of the time, means that a 'narrow', residual, useful space is rarely reserved for everyone.

The debate on the transition of mobility styles towards more sustainable habits and, ultimately, towards zero-emission mobility, will therefore need to take into account a multidimensional ecosystem with the overall wellbeing of people, in terms of both physical and mental health.

Technology and its constant progress are one of the main factors enabling this transformation. Two examples, among many possible ones, are:

1. Geo-localisation systems to manage and optimise vehicle and pedestrian traffic flow will provide ideas for redesigning the road system and improve coexistence between cars, light mobility vehicles and pedestrians.
2. Platforms and apps for the integrated management of modal solutions – MaaS (Mobility as a Service) – will make it possible to manage travel with simplicity and immediacy.

However, change does not rest only on technological evolution, but also on the capacity of institutional decision-makers who must accompany change with actions aimed at adherence to a new culture of mobility supporting, for example, the advancement of digital literacy, which is still very uneven in Italy.

Chiara Ferrari

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3. Food: Recipes for the future
4. Fashion: Opportunities and challenges in 2023
5. Green mobility: Cities as a laboratory for tomorrow’s mobility
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