Fair sustainable mobility. Policies for regional rail transport

Mobility strategies in Europe have been reviewed in recent years according to the environmental and climatic emergencies. The transport sector is among the main causes of climate change, accounting for about 27% of the total emissions of harmful gases in the European Union. Several programming documents, on an international scale, indicate the train as a mean to be favoured in investment policies due to its proven convenience in terms of environmental sustainability. For the community, the use of the train can produce significant positive impacts in terms of reduction of energy consumption, emissions of harmful gases into the atmosphere, accidents, and other benefits in terms of travel quality and roads congestion. The attention of government authorities in more developed countries has been mainly directed to the High-Speed Rail (HSR) with huge resources invested or planned. A logic of concentrating investments on a few railways prevailed, generally aimed at quickly connecting metropolitan areas, rather than an approach to widespread distribution throughout the territory and the whole railway network. A fundamental contradiction has arisen, at least in Europe, between the declarations of principle of many documents and the reality. In the first part of the paper, critical reflections are proposed relating to the passenger rail transport in Europe, with an in-depth analysis of the Italian context. Data on HSR and regional railways are compared, highlighting the limits and inequities of the policies pursued by some governments that have preferred the logic of corridors (core network). The opportunity to change strategy is therefore affirmed, adopting a sustainability approach in the development policies of railway transport, inspired by territorial, economic, social and environmental equity. In the second part, attention is focused on a specific case study, a railway system in a poor and peripheral European region such as Calabria. Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis, the criticalities relating to the railway system are highlighted. Therefore, two alternative scenario designs are proposed (new expensive HSR line, balanced upgrading of infrastructures and services on the existing network), with relative performance characteristics and a comparative assessment. The research highlights how limited targeted investments and services on quality standards can bring a relaunch of rail transport over large territories, with positive implications for users and the community, also favouring the reduction of climate-altering emissions. A vision of Fair-Sustainable Transport is proposed.