Promoting the shift from private cars to micromobility (e.g., bike, e-bike, scooter) can represent a valuable action to improve city sustainability and liveability. Micromobility can help to replace trips by individual private cars (e.g., daily short round trips) as well as to improve coverage and accessibility of transit services, and, subsequently, to reduce the traffic impacts (e.g., pollutant emissions). It can be seen as a potential solution to move people more efficiently in urban areas, as well as to push people towards a more active mobility behaviour, contributing to the well-being goals. In this context, the paper, rather than inferring the users’ propensity to change their travel mode, proposes a methodology to identify car trips that can be considered the most compatible with micromobility. Estimation of the potential demand (e.g., the upper level of car trips that could be replaced by micromobility) is carried out by exploiting the opportunity offered by floating car data (FCD) for characterising car trips. Its goodness is therefore evaluated through an application to a real case study (i.e., the city of Trani, Apulia Region, Southern Italy), divided into seventy traffic zones, and where a FCD dataset of about 5,200 trips was available. The FCD allowed the car trips to be characterised (e.g., origin and destination, path features) instead of using the traditional surveys. The results indicate that a significant share of daily car trips can be substituted (i.e., the most compatible) by micromobility (31% of car round trips in the case study), with considerable potential environmental gains (traffic emission reduction; less than 21% of total emissions from private cars). Results can be of interest to local authorities in integrating micromobility in urban mobility planning and promoting new sustainable transport alternatives, as well as to transport companies for designing new appeal services. The developed methodology is parametric and uses easy-to-obtain data available worldwide; thus, it can be easily transferred to other city contexts.

This paper presents a procedure for the solution of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) based on reliable link travel times. They are obtained as a combination of spatially disaggregated and aggregated data about simulated traffic conditions on an urban road network. The disaggregated data concern the congested link travel times, which are traditionally used as variable to be minimized in VRP. The novelty of this research article consists in the introduction of spatially aggregated data, which are estimated by means of the Network Fundamental Diagram (NFD). In a within-day dynamic context, they are a measure of reliability of travel times because they could anticipate the latter ones’ variation in the short term. The equation of reliable link travel times is composed of a congestion term, expressing the traditional congested link travel times (or generalized costs), and a reliability term, which depends on the fundamental diagram of the link and the NFD of the homogeneous cluster of adjacent links. The proposed procedure has been validated and applied for two real test cases. NFDs data are used in the proposed link travel time function to calculate reliable travel times. The reliable link travel times are used for the solution of VRP to obtain optimal routes of freight vehicles.

The paper aims to investigate short sea shipping services as a competitive, sustainable freight transport system which is able to respond to economic, social and environmental needs. An assessment methodology is proposed which considers an aggregate discrete choice model, simulating the split between the competitive transport alternatives in the Mediterranean basin. The proposed methodology was used to assess the potential of short sea shipping (SSS) and the net benefits deriving from lower external costs in the north-western Mediterranean basin. Two future scenarios are considered: introduction of new SSS services as envisaged by current EU projects and plans, and the introduction of new SSS routes and an increase in frequencies of existing services. Significant results were obtained in terms of shifting freight traffic from the road network as well as external benefits.