Sustainability of Freight Transport through an Integrated Approach: the Case of the Eastern Sicily Port System

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Investigating the Correlation between Transportation Social Need and Accessibility: the Case of Catania

Abstract The development of cities and transportation systems of the last few years made possible to expand the range of individuals, giving them the opportunity to locate their residence far away from the places where they carry out daily activities. The ability to make long journeys has become more and more an essential condition to access opportunities of the territory. This necessity can be connected to transportation social need, which scholars define both in terms of people requiring a public transportation service and number of trips they would make if they had minimal limitations on their mobility; accessibility refers to the ease of reaching goods, services, activities and destinations, which together are called opportunities. This research presents the application of a measure of transportation social need and accessibility for the city of Catania, in Italy. The measure of transportation social need, based on transportation and social disadvantage indicators, has been carried out with reference to Italian national statistical institute zonation of the city. A zonal accessibility measure, considering both private and public transportation and evaluating the ease of reaching desired destinations, have been calculated and an analysis of correlation among transportation social need measure and accessibility measures has been carried out in order to verify the strength of relation between them. Due to the high resolution level of the spatial analysis, manipulation of data and computation of indicators and measures was supported by a GIS approach. Three different public transport scenarios have been analyzed by performing a relative accessibility loss computation showing that improvements in public transport service lead to general improvements in relative accessibility loss

Mass Balance as Green Economic and Sustainable Management in WEEE Sector

Abstract This study investigates the treatment procedures of the Large House Hold Appliance to describe the production of secondary raw material within the Waste of Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) sector in step with the Circular Economy model. Drawing on the modern accounting system, the project developed a perspective, which highlights accounting technologies (i.e. Environmental Accounting, sustainable performance indicators, Mass Balance) as new adaptive management tools for sustainable firms. The theoretical arguments shown by a longitudinal case study proposes a conceptual framework of the e-waste manage within treatment plants in the Sicilian context. The results demonstrate a percentage analysis by waste fraction of all materials recovered which can be re-use. Then, the recognition of critical raw materials identifies the end of west in implementing a competitive advantage for business growth

Public Engagement for Designing New Transport Services: Investigating Citizen Preferences from a Multiple Criteria Perspective

Abstract This paper presents a multi-criteria-based methodology to involve the general public in transport decision-making, aiming at collecting information useful to design a technically sound and well-accepted transport service. The case study presented is part of a wider participation procedure, involving experts and key stakeholders in the definition of the problem and of the possible solutions. It regards the connection between a metro station and a park-and-ride facility through a short-range transit system in the city of Catania (Italy). Around six hundred citizens have been involved via a wide consultation survey adopting a multi-criteria perspective, asking them to perform pairwise comparisons of different elements (i.e. criteria) that can characterize a transport service. Results of the analysis are useful to understand their heterogeneous preferences and pave the way for a well-thought-out design of a new transport service

Linking Public Transport User Satisfaction with Service Accessibility for Sustainable Mobility Planning

Increasing the Quality of Service (QoS) of Public Transport (PT), in order to attract more users, is one of the goals of transport companies and urban policy-makers. A continuous monitoring of data on users' satisfaction is desirable, but most of the time such process is costly. Finding correlations between PT accessibility, user satisfaction and PT ridership might be the key to prioritize where and how service quality improvements have to be put in place. The aim of this paper is to investigate the correlation among PT use, user satisfaction and PT accessibility using a spatial and statistical approach to find useful and simple indicators for sustainable mobility planning. The case study is Catania, a medium-sized city located in southern Italy, with a focus on the mobility of University students. In this respect, students experienced fare-free PT from 2018 to 2020 as one of the main results of collaboration between the University and the two urban PT operators, providing free access to bus and metro transport services in the city. Student satisfaction and relevant data regarding their mobility behavior were constantly monitored via a web survey: the analysis conducted in this study is based on a database of about 4000 responses collected between 2018 and 2019. Spatial and statistical correlations between user satisfaction, transit ridership and accessibility will provide useful information for a correct planning and management of PT networks by transport companies, highlighting diverse insights for different PT options

On the spatial feasibility of crowdshipping services in university communities

Abstract Crowdshipping, i.e. delivering goods via the crowd, aims at combining passenger with freight trips. This concept is particularly useful, especially in urban contexts, since it allows using the spare capacity of vehicles and reducing the negative impacts of urban freight transport. While attractive in principle, a crowdshipping service needs to be appropriately conceived to be effective. In this respect, matching passenger with freight transport demand is one of the main issues to consider. Besides, it is important to promote a sustainable crowdshipping, i.e. perfomed via sustainable transport modes. This paper presents a GIS-based approach to evaluate the spatial feasibility of crowdshipping services using public transport or active modes in the context of a University community. The case study analyzed focuses on e-commerce deliveries and takes into account a campus with venues located in different zones in the city of Catania (Italy). The methodology is designed according to spatial considerations related to the proximity of delivery points and home addresses, students' flows between origins and destinations and main mode of transport used. Results are useful to design the service in a well-established community, which could be considered more inclined to be involved

Influence of Accessibility, Land Use and Transport Policies on the Transport Energy Dependence of a City

Abstract Transports can be considered as the main contributors of climate change and cities' total energy consumption. In order to reduce transport energy, which is mainly influenced by urban form and available systems, three strategies can be adopted: a land use distribution lowering the need of motorized mobility; adoption of measures fostering low impact transport modes; promotion of energy efficient vehicle fleets. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the suitability of accessibility measures as a planning tool to evaluate the effectiveness of integrated transport and land use policies adopted to reduce the transport energy dependence of an urban area

Land-estimation questions in improvement of the Trazzera’s regional property in Sicily

The “demanio trazzerale” (herd way regional property) in Sicily constitutes a significant quota of the territorial social capital, due to its historical and cultural origin.A recent law draft considers its new and diverse potentiality to be assumed in the re-planning of the territory at inter-municipal scale, but some criticalities concern the calculation of the legitimization corresponding sale price.The contribution provides appraisal tools for: the legitimizations in urban areas, with a valuation model of the fair market value; b) the valuation of the territorial value of a “trazzera”, in order to select the ones more suitable to be included within a recovery land plan for a new and different territorial policy, which the administration will have to undertake if the law draft is validated.The “demanio trazzerale” (herd way regional property) in Sicily constitutes a significant quota of the territorial social capital, due to its historical and cultural origin.A recent law draft considers its new and diverse potentiality to be assumed in the re-planning of the territory at inter-municipal scale, but some criticalities concern the calculation of the legitimization corresponding sale price.The contribution provides appraisal tools for: the legitimizations in urban areas, with a valuation model of the fair market value; b) the valuation of the territorial value of a “trazzera”, in order to select the ones more suitable to be included within a recovery land plan for a new and different territorial policy, which the administration will have to undertake if the law draft is validated

Combining Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with role-playing games for stakeholder engagement in complex transport decisions

Abstract This paper presents a procedure for the structuring of a transport decision-making problem and evaluation of the solutions proposed from a multi-stakeholder multi-criteria perspective. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used as multicriteria decision technique, while a role-playing game is used to reproduce a participatory process where University students act as key stakeholders. The case study regards the building of a new metro station in Catania (Italy), which will be the nearest station to a big University district. A dedicated transit system linking the metro station and the district is under study and four different alternatives have been proposed. Students were initially informed about the objectives of key stakeholders in order to be able to play the different roles. A hierarchy of the problem was built with them and AHP was used to elicit their preferences and evaluate priorities for each stakeholder group. A comparison between a mathematical aggregation of individual priorities and a consensus vote was performed to verify the differences between the two different methods and their compliance with the stated stakeholder preferences. AHP-based participatory procedure proved to be suitable to tackle the complexity of transport decisions