A mobility office for four Unions of Municipalities: a conversation with Federica Tognini

Interview by Paolo Barbato with Federica Tognini.

In municipalities classified as peripheral and ultra-peripheral, public transport accounts for less than 5% of trips, active mobility remains below 20% and cars and motorbikes exceed 75%. These are the figures from Isfort’s Audimob Observatory, and they describe a dependence on the car that no company plan, on its own, can dismantle.

The Garfagnana, Lunigiana, Media Valle del Serchio and Appennino Pistoiese inner area brings together four Unions of Municipalities across three provinces, for around 108,000 inhabitants. The project area, the part on whose behalf the interventions are carried out, counts 19 municipalities, all peripheral or ultra-peripheral, 38,000 inhabitants and a density of 37.2 inhabitants per square kilometre. According to the regional dossier, Tuscany’s six inner areas are losing population at a rate of 3.5%, in line with the national figure. This is the context in which the project “Co-progettare la connettività” was born, and with it the Mobility Office, the technical structure that coordinates mobility across the four Unions.

A technical structure before a service

Paolo Barbato: The first thing that strikes you about your work is not so much the service as the structure and the path you followed to define it. A key role seems to be played by the creation of the Mobility Office, a steering group involving the technical staff of the four Unions. How did it come about, and what does it do today that was not done before?

Federica Tognini: The Mobility Office comes from a basic observation shared by many unions of municipalities, namely that daily trips do not stop at the municipal boundary, whereas responsibilities, strategies and actions often do. People living in these valleys naturally cross several municipalities, and often different provinces, even just to get to school, to hospital or to work. The office brings the technical staff of the individual Unions to the same table, first of all for cooperation and sharing in the development of innovative mobility projects. To make this possible, at least in this initial start-up phase, we relied on external technical and scientific coordination provided in practice by TPS Pro, in the person of Matteo Scamporrino, Mobility Manager d’Area Interna.

It is worth noting that the technical staff from the different unions were not selected for specific technical expertise in mobility, but for real, hands-on knowledge of the territory, understood both as physical places and as communities. In August 2025 the Cabina di Regia of the inner area decreed the creation of the Mobility Office. Each Union was given the option of identifying the internal person most suited to the role; subsequently, in the first four months of work between September and December 2025, the Mobility Manager d’Area Interna carried out a technical and disciplinary training programme on Mobility Management.

The Mobility Office’s programme was extended to administrators and employees of all the Unions and Municipalities, strengthening skills and a culture of mobility throughout the inner area. From January 2026 the office became fully operational and took part in the operational and management construction of the project through twice-weekly coordination meetings. The practical difference with or without the Mobility Office is that the problems of individual municipalities and individual unions stop being isolated and are shared within a single area-wide picture.

This allows us to generate integrated strategies and, at last, joint actions based on shared priorities, optimising the use of vehicles and responding flexibly to the real corridors of marginality. The Mobility Office played a fundamental role in engaging the stakeholders needed to deliver the community service, because each member knew their own local reality best.

Mapping real accessibility, not distance

Paolo Barbato: The project made use of geodesign work, that is, a mapping of real accessibility to essential services in order to define the actual catchment areas of the services planned by the project. In companies we are used to thinking in kilometres. What changes when you measure real accessibility?

Federica Tognini: What changes is that the kilometre says almost nothing in a territory with such a complex morphology and such a low population density, what counts are relationships and real accessibility. For the Servizio di Comunità and for the carpooling system in particular, we needed ranges of action calibrated on the real territory and the real settlement pattern.

We therefore went on to build, in a GIS environment, a settlement, morphological and road-network model of the entire inner area; this base was built not only from the available geographic data (Geoscopio Regione toscana, Open Street Map, Google Maps, public transport GTFS data, etc.), but above all thanks to the contribution and input of the Mobility Office members and of local technical staff and consultants. In particular, local POI (Points of Interest) were identified and divided into four macro categories: Education, Health, Retail, Social Services.

The first processing, concerning Absolute Accessibility to the inner area’s services, produced four specific maps, one for each of the POI macro categories, showing the absolute accessibility index of the inner area’s territory. A grid of one-hectare hexagons was created covering the whole surface of the inner area and, for each hexagon, we calculated how many POIs, or services, were reachable within 25 real minutes by car, colouring them appropriately with a gradient. The results make it possible to grasp at a glance the real accessibility to services across the whole inner area. This allowed us to identify the most isolated hamlets and zones, and therefore the ones to be served as a priority by the services planned by the project.

The second geodesign phase is organised into 19 municipal profiles, aimed at assessing the specific accessibility to the various services and attractor hubs of each Municipality benefiting from the Servizio di Comunità. The analysis sets out to map the road-based and time-based ‘range of action’ needed to guarantee a minimum provision of essential services to citizens. Thanks to these profiles it was possible to “calibrate”, in time and space, the service guaranteed to the citizens of each Municipality, giving priority to those least well provided for to begin with.

These spatial analyses made it possible to objectify on a scientific basis a phenomenon well known to those who live in mountain areas: the deep discrepancy between theoretical distances (as the crow flies) and real road travel times. Thanks to this rigorous mapping of accessibility, it was possible to allocate the available resources in a targeted and efficient way, directing them mainly to where the real corridors of marginality are found.

The community service and who puts it on the road

Paolo Barbato: The operational part provides for on-demand transport for people in a condition of fragility and with limited access to public transport, managed by the third sector using vehicles granted free of charge with a possible final buyout. It is an unusual choice, because it entrusts the service to bodies that are not transport companies. Why this route?

Federica Tognini: Because in a dispersed territory demand is thin and spread out, and a traditional line service does not intercept it at sustainable costs. What is more, travel needs are often shared but very much tied to events or situations, from the weekly market in the various hamlets to five-a-side football and other sports for young people, from the cinema to vocational courses, passing, of course, through GPs or municipal services. Organising public transport lines that respond to these intermittent needs, which are nonetheless very important to citizens’ daily lives, is very difficult. Third sector associations, on the other hand, have widespread, fine-grained knowledge of people and in many cases already provide accompaniment alongside healthcare services. The formula of vehicles granted free of charge with a possible final buyout serves to answer the question that always comes up in these projects, namely what happens when the funding ends.

The Mobility Office members, working together with the Mobility Manager d’Area Interna, organised targeted meetings at the level of each Union of Municipalities with the municipalities but, above all, with the associations they knew to be active and operating in the territory. This made the selection of potentially interested bodies highly effective.

In these meetings we explained the formula for making the vehicles available, clarified who could use the service, how and when the service was to be provided, how to report on it to the various unions and what the buyout possibilities were. This produced guidelines for the participation of interested third sector operators, which allowed us in the meantime to build up the necessary vehicle fleet. To date, the number of cars estimated as necessary will be around 16.

The third sector body entrusted with the service is required to provide at least 12 hours of community service per week, split over at least two days, which it will decide on the basis of needs, but it will have to record all trips in a roadbook to be handed over regularly to the authorities. The contract provides for a mandatory initial one-year period of service provision by the entrusted bodies. Following verification and acknowledgement that the service has actually been correctly provided in this first phase, thanks to the roadbooks and to constant monitoring by the Mobility Office, the vehicle will be left at that same body’s disposal for a further 4 years, after which the third sector association may buy it out.

The list of beneficiaries is entirely the responsibility of the relevant Municipality and the third sector association receives it with quarterly updates: trips for the people on the list provided by the Municipality are free of charge. This does not prevent the association from providing services to other users not on the list envisaged by the project, outside the 12 hours of service, using the cars provided by the project for other social purposes.

Who is left out when there is only one car

Paolo Barbato: One of the stated objectives concerns those who do not always have a private vehicle available, in particular young people, the over-65s and single-car families. In our world this becomes a person who cannot accept a shift or submit an application. Do you see it from this angle too?

Federica Tognini: We see it in exactly that way. When there is only one vehicle in the household, the right to mobility often follows a family hierarchy, and whoever is left without a vehicle inevitably has to give something up, typically education, work, care or leisure. It is a form of exclusion that does not appear in traffic statistics, because it concerns trips that do not take place. In analyses of inner areas, the debate often focuses on the depopulation-ageing pairing, associating vulnerability almost exclusively with the elderly. There is, however, an invisible youth marginality that directly affects teenagers and young people: after facing daily school journeys that often exceed two hours there and back, these young people find themselves confined to their homes. Without flexible mobility solutions, access to extracurricular, sporting or social activities is ruled out, especially in single-vehicle families where the only available car is used for work. The integration of the Servizio di Comunità and carpooling breaks down this limitation, offering an efficient transport alternative that fosters real social life in the territory, preventing both geographical isolation and a forced ‘virtualisation’ of relationships caused by the systematic lack of physical alternatives.

Four Unions, three provinces, many mayors

Paolo Barbato: Let me move to the part that is harder to tell. Holding together four Unions of Municipalities across three provinces means getting administrations with different sizes, budgets and priorities to agree. When a choice suits the area but does not suit the individual municipality, how do you get it over the line? And what have been the real forms of resistance over these years?

Federica Tognini: Bringing together four Unions of Municipalities containing 58 municipalities, of which only 19 benefit from the Servizio di Comunità, is not easy precisely because of the differences in context, both physical-geographical and socio-economic. Let us say that over the years, thanks also to the SNAI strategy, cooperation and cohesion between these bodies has increased and more and more each body, even the smallest, has understood that there is strength in unity. The project, thanks also to the instrument of the Mobility Office, was able to rest on a solid base of inter-institutional cooperation which vertically gave us authority in dialogue with stakeholders linked to public transport, trade associations, the third sector, etc. That was not a given.

Designing strategies and interventions in these territories presupposes, so to speak, an adaptive trust in the other parties: you continually have to reconcile your own needs, municipal ones for example, with those of the neighbouring municipalities and your own Union, but also with distant Municipalities and Unions in other provinces, in the awareness of scarce resources and out of respect for everyone’s needs. The Geodesign analysis with the municipal profiles is also meant to give municipalities a kind of “global awareness” within the inner area, precisely in order to encourage the active and informed adaptation of their own needs and priorities in relation to others.

The dialogue with those who manage corporate mobility

Paolo Barbato: Our newsletter is read by the Mobility Managers of companies with more than a hundred employees, many of whom work in plants located in territories like yours. Within your perimeter, is there already a dialogue with them, or with an Area Mobility Manager? And if a company brought you its employees’ residence data and working hours tomorrow, what could you really do with it?

Federica Tognini: Attention to home-to-work travel is the last piece of the project, not in terms of importance of course, since without work it will be hard to fight depopulation and abandonment, but in terms of the instrument of reference. Indeed, the funds for this project are mostly allocated to purchasing the vehicles and to disseminating the project itself across the territory, but we felt it was right to devote part of them to piloting an inner-area carpooling service, which we believe in a great deal. We started from the idea and the study of the platforms used for corporate carpooling and from there we thought of readapting it to a very large context such as the inner area and to a user base with very varied origins and destinations.

Registration will be allowed only to residents, workers, city users or tourists of the inner area, through an online self-declaration form. Those offering a ride will be able to request a contribution for the lift as a mere expense reimbursement; one hypothesis we are considering is that those using the platform will accumulate points giving them rewards both in local businesses and in benefits offered by the various municipalities; for the details we are waiting for the end of the discussions that will take place in the autumn.

We expect carpooling to become a tool primarily useful to workers; indeed, the territorial reality concentrates productive and commercial activities in a few places, and from our simulations, cars shared by workers, including from different sectors and companies, could become the norm.

Innovating in a territory that is emptying out

Paolo Barbato: I will close with the most awkward question. You work on an area that is losing population at a rate of 3.5%, with ultra-peripheral municipalities and a density of 37 inhabitants per square kilometre. Projects take a long time, results are seen only after years, and in the meantime some people leave anyway. What does it feel like to do innovation at this speed, and how do you measure whether it is working?

Federica Tognini: Public administrations are, by their very nature, ‘turbo-slow’ organisations. On the one hand we pay for the physiological slowness of the timeframes dictated by the schedules (Gantt charts), by reporting deadlines and by the complexity of decision-making processes involving dozens of different actors. On the other hand, though, we are showing that we can engage the ‘turbo’. And we do it by coordinating on three fronts: at technical level with the Mobility Office, at administrative level through increasingly tight and reactive Cabine di Regia, and at social level by making the most of the community projects we have been cultivating in the territory for years. Indeed, being able to count on a solid social network, even one that is numerically small and geographically sparse, often acts as an accelerator of decisions and dynamics. Now that we have finally got into the right gear, the aim is to make this project run at a wholly new speed.

What it takes for the model to be repeated

Paolo Barbato: One last, more operational question. If another territory wanted to build a Mobility Office, what should it start from and what are the mistakes to avoid?

Federica Tognini: It should start from a lead body that provides structure and continuity, because without a stable technical base the coordination lasts only as long as the project. The second point is data, which must be collected before deciding and not after. It then needs technical and scientific consultancy to facilitate both data collection and the training/updating of internal technical staff and decision-makers. Finally, it needs projects, even small ones, to be managed or co-managed by the Mobility Office; if it is not made operational, this instrument inevitably tends to fade away.

Federica’s closing thought

I want to stress strongly that this project is highly experimental in character; compared with the initial idea we are trying to innovate a great deal in order to speed things up and increase its effectiveness, and we hope that the project’s actions will not only be delivered but will “survive” the end of the project and evolve.

Innovating is hard and complex work, but lately we have also been receiving some good recognition; indeed, the inter-provincial project “Garfagnana – Lunigiana – Media Valle del Serchio – Appennino Pistoiese” was among the five finalists in the Mobility category of the prestigious Premio Future4Cities 2026. The award, created by Will Media and FROM in collaboration with OGR Torino, maps and showcases the best urban and territorial innovation projects in Italy.

We hope that this interview too will help make this project known to professionals, administrators and technical staff in the sector, encouraging exchange and discussion. The future of the inner areas is less rosy than in the past, and starting again from mobility and its management seems to us the winning card to reverse the depopulation trend and to innovate fragile territories.

Who is Federica Tognini

Federica Tognini heads the office managing the Area Strategy for the Garfagnana, Lunigiana, Media Valle del Serchio, Appennino Pistoiese inner area at the Unione Comuni Garfagnana, the lead body of the Strategy.

Sources used for this reconstruction

• Department for Cohesion Policies, profile of the Garfagnana area, 2014-20 cycle
• Area Strategy website, SNAI 2021-27 section
• Regione Toscana, Territorial strategies in inner areas, Area 5
• Regional dossier on Tuscany’s SNAI areas, taken up in the report on the Castelnuovo di Garfagnana conference, April 2026
• LuccaInDiretta, description of the project and of the Mobility Office, 18 July 2026
• Isfort, Audimob Observatory, summary of the 21st Report on the mobility of Italians, document in the Wiseair archive.