Raising awareness on the new mobility strategy

Summary

Minimetro, car pooling, Limited Traffic Zone in the historic city centre, innovative urban goods movement are only few of the innovative schemes that Perugia intends to develop, as the Urban Mobility Plan is implemented. These actions need to be accepted and supported by the citizens. To achieve this, their levels of awareness must be raised.

Implementing sustainable mobility

A CIVITAS branded awareness campaign (ESC “Clean-Safe-Easy” mobility) has been developed in order to inform the customers on the new inter-modal network and new services; the brand, at first identified in its graphical layout, has been customised for each Perugia measure, to create an immediate link between the measure and its impact on sustainable mobility. The logo is now highly visible in the city, in relation to some of Perugia measures.

For the first time in the city, a Task Force of the relevant public transport stakeholders has been created with the creation of UMBRIA MOBILITÀ: in November 2010, thanks to corporate changes at APM, FCU joined the initial task force composed by MUPER, APM and MINIMETRO. A further step for the formal creation of the Task Force was the identification of the representative members for each stakeholder at the beginning of 2012. The improvement of the communication was useful to increase the integration and quality of public transport services and, as a consequence, the users’ perception of service quality.

The main objectives were the following. • To create a Task Force of all relevant local stakeholders of the public transport to work together to raise awareness. • To inform the customers on the new intermodal network and the new services offered by the Municipality. • To develop a communication strategy able to continue beyond the project’s lifetime, creating a sustainable urban mobility “brand” with three main components - easy, clean and safe - which covers all the 15 Perugia measures.

Progress

Over the last 20 years, during a period of rapidly increasing car ownership, Perugia has made innovative investments in the area of Park and Ride, based on escalators systems, to protect the city centre from excessive traffic. This has been combined with a city centre vehicle access control system. However, the public transport network required further integration to produce the necessary shift from private car use to public transport use. The opportunity for greater integration has been provided by the innovative investment in the new Minimetro line, which gives a spine to feed public transport traffic into the city centre. The recent Urban Mobility Plan introduced the concept of an intermodal public transport network with an integrated fare system, which needs to raise awareness among citizens of the new chances they have to move around the city. Thus Perugia had all of the necessary building bricks to introduce a fully sustainable transport system; this measure had the aim to promote the benefits of these choices among all sections of Perugia society, so the new opportunities given by the integrated mobility system have been properly disseminated to the citizens.

Outcomes

The main result has been to raise the positive awareness of CIVITAS initiative and the satisfaction with the RENAISSANCE measures implemented in the city, so as to increase knowledge about sustainable mobility and its potential benefits for the quality of life of the citizens. Furthermore, through the development of the brand ESC, the communication strategy will continue after the end of the project as a permanent feature of transport policy in the city.