Accessibility and Public Transport Mobility for a Smart(er) Island: Evidence from Sardinia (Italy)

In the world, many islands have defined a set of strategic guidelines aimed at improving their smart growth. One of the main objectives inside these strategic guidelines is to improve territorial accessibility through strategic projects, by using digital technologies on innovative data. These projects, especially in geographically closed systems such as the island contexts, affect the attractiveness of the public transport service (PTS). In fact, the PTS travel times, the modal share, and the general quality of the system are linked not only to the quality of transport infrastructures, place-based organization, and population distribution, but also to the physical conformation of the territory. The PTS in Sardinia (Italy) reflects the actual population distribution, disseminated in many small and low-density municipalities. Inner areas show a huge depopulation trend, while the major cities in coastal areas are growing their population. The island exhibits a profound transformation during the last decades, and people move from inner areas to coastal ones, mainly for business and leisure reasons. Only 12% of travels use PTS, and almost 67% use private cars. Moreover, the tourist sector attracts 3,100,000 vacationers during the summer, a fact that brings forward new mobility tendencies because more than 92% of them travel by private vehicles. Despite this situation, the traditional PTS organization in Sardinia does not take into account these specificities. Based on these assumptions, the focus of this paper is to underline the main characteristics of the Sardinia transport domestic accessibility. The main results show that domestic accessibility is poor from the inner to coastal areas and vice versa. Therefore, the paper suggests rethinking current patterns and bring on board new solutions, in order to provide a smarter, safer and more sustainable PTS’s development model that integrates the new tendencies in mobility.