Transportation Elasticity for the Analysis of Italian Transportation Demand on a Regional Scale

Is there a relationship between economic fluctuations and transportation demand? How does a GDP variation influence passenger and freight mobility? Interested readers may find an answer to both these questions in the following paper. Taking Italian regions as subject of the analysis, the paper describes a simplified but rather reliable elasticity-based procedure for the analysis of transportation demand. Within this paper, elasticity can be roughly defined as the percentage change in the transportation demand produced from a unit fluctuation of GDP. The concept of elasticity will be widely defined in section 1, also summarising some of the most interesting results of the literature. As the use of elasticity for the forecast of transportation demand is also considered in this paper, section 2 deals with a brief overview of the main methods. In section 3, relations between transportation demand and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Italy are derived, a forecast method based on transportation elasticity is developed and its results considered in the light of the literature. Section 4 gives statistic evidence to the method and analyses of demand elasticity of the Italian regional systems. Finally, some conclusions are drawn (section 5).