The design of an urban public transport service in a SUMP context

The SUMP, Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan, is often an opportunity to reorganize and enhance public transport services in relation to the hypothesis of strategic development of a city's transport system. The paper proposes a methodological approach for planning the operation of Public Transport services over a ten-year time horizon, aimed at optimizing resources and increasing the attractiveness. The approach is aimed at rationalizing and increasing the quality and quantity of services, taking into account budget and regulatory constraints. A plan tool is therefore configured on three operational dimensions with their respective constraints: the traffic planning, the design of Public Transport services, and a wise management of the company budget. The three dimensions interact and make the analysis and search for an optimal solution more complex, but the approach appears interesting precisely because it responds to multiple objectives of effectiveness towards potential users, of management efficiency, of mobility governance. A case study relating to a city in Southern Italy is therefore presented, with an application of the approach and the design of an optimized service, in relation to administrative and budget constraints. The results are expressed and discussed through specific performance indicators