4 Aspects of Mobility Management to Change in 2025

Throughout 2024, working closely with dozens of Corporate and Area Mobility Managers across Italy, we have gained important insights into aspects of Mobility Management that need to change. In this article, we share four critical elements that, based on this field experience, we believe are essential to transform in 2025.

1. From Annual Survey to Mobility Profile

The anonymous annual survey represents today’s “Sisyphean boulder” of Mobility Management: every year, the Mobility Manager must push it up the mountain, only to see it roll back down and start over. The progressive decrease in response rate makes analyses increasingly less representative and potentially misleading. How should we interpret, for example, an apparent doubling of cyclists from 10% to 20% when the response rate has halved from 60% to 30%? This dynamic transforms survey promotion from a means to an end, taking away precious time and energy from designing and implementing concrete initiatives. The solution? A continuously updated individual mobility profile that frees the Mobility Manager from this recurring activity, allowing them to focus on creating value for employees.

2. From Isolated Analysis to Supply-Demand Integration

Mobility supply analysis limited to the company headquarters perimeter offers a partial and potentially misleading view. To identify real opportunities for modal shift, it is necessary to extend the supply analysis - public transport, bike lanes, sharing services - to each employee’s area of origin. Only by integrating individual mobility profiles with the analysis of catchment areas for different transport infrastructures and services can we map the real potential for change, precisely identifying which employees could benefit from more efficient and sustainable mobility alternatives.

3. From Total Outsourcing to Strategic Balance

While some Mobility Management activities - such as data collection and processing - can be effectively automated or outsourced, complete outsourcing of the function almost always produces disappointing results. Mobility plans developed entirely by external consultants tend to be standardized and rarely adapt to company specifics. Consultants are valuable in setting up processes and transferring know-how, but concrete results require the presence of trained internal figures equipped with necessary resources to continuously manage Mobility Management activities.

4. Towards a Data Transmission Standard

The lack of a technical standard for data transmission to Area Mobility Managers represents a significant obstacle to Mobility Management efficiency. Each Municipality requires different formats and delivery methods, transforming what should be a routine activity into a complex administrative puzzle. For a Mobility Manager with offices distributed across the national territory, even just identifying the correct delivery methods for each Municipality becomes an activity that takes away valuable time. Despite the existence of ministerial guidelines on content to be transmitted, the absence of a unified technical standard unnecessarily multiplies administrative workload, taking resources away from higher value-added activities.

After nearly four years since the implementation of the Home-Work Travel Plans regulation, it is now imperative to roll up our sleeves and tackle these four critical aspects head-on. Only in this way can we prevent Mobility Managers from remaining mere regulatory compliance figures, transforming them instead into true agents of change capable of concretely improving the quality of home-work commuting and anticipating solutions to increasingly complex and urgent mobility challenges.