Connecting university facilities with railway transport stations: the case of Catania

Public transport is one of the first mode used by students in Italy and this is confirmed by official data by the Italian National Institute of Statistics. Catania, a city in the south of Italy, takes the distance from these standards by having a modal share of public transport trips, especially train trips, lower than in many other Italian cities. Even if the city has a good network of urban stations located at a cycling distance from university facilities, the accessibility to such transport nodes is not always guaranteed. The aim of this study is to provide a methodological contribution to promote intermodality between cycling mobility and railway transport by connecting railway stations with university venues. A multi-criteria spatial approach is presented to select suitable stations lacking adequate intermodal infrastructures, which match students’ mobility patterns, and plan intervention measures towards the promotion of conjoint use of railway and bike. The approach takes into account information on stations’ locations and their connectivity, geometric characteristics of the road network, socio-economic data related to university population and students’ mobility habits collected by a wide survey. The data acquired are used to build a Geographic Information System and perform a spatial multicriteria analysis which allows to obtain a ranking of the locations, providing suggestions to decision-makers on how to select priority interventions.