Cycling for a Sustainable Touristic Mobility: A Preliminary Study in an Urban Area of Italy

Abstract

This study wants to give a contribution for the investigation of sustainable mobility with positive consequences on public health implementing policies starting from cyclists’ perceptions. Data were collected by interviewing cyclists along three bike lanes of an urban area of southern Italy through a face-to-face survey. The survey was conducted in Autumn 2019, interviewing a sample of 129 cyclists. In order to identify the critical aspects of the bike paths, both an importance-performance analysis (IPA) and a gap-IPA were performed. The average values of the cyclists’ perceptions of each aspect have been considered as performance values. The importance values have been obtained by performing a principal component analysis (PCA), which was helpful also for better defining the service quality phenomenon. From the PCA, six latent constructs can be identified as: “Physical Nuisance”; “Non-physical Nuisance”; “Physical Comfort”; “Non-physical Comfort”; “Protection”; and “Ambience”. The results of Gap-IPA confirmed that the criticalities of the bike paths relate to the degree of protection in relation to accidents, and to the degree of nuisance caused by pollution and opposing pedestrians along the path. Based on the conducted analyses, sustainable tourism implementing policies should be oriented in solving the emerged criticalities of the existing bike paths. The results of Gap-IPA are very intuitive and can certainly be helpful for identifying the most convenient strategies.

The Impacts of EU Cohesion Policy on Sustainable Tourism: The Case of POSEUR in Algarve

“…According to the literature, the goal is to tackle issues that are highly relevant to the literature in this field of study, as suggested by [49] (2022), such as the adoption of renewable energies [50,51], mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and the pollution caused by the transportation industry [52,53], improving waste management [54,55], and alleviating water scarcity [56,57] and the risks and vulnerabilities caused by climate change [58,59]. Some of the recent solutions for the challenges mentioned above include the construction of tourism infrastructures with renewable materials [60], the promotion of cycling as a mobility method in touristic urban areas [61], and the reuse of water in resorts [57], as well as the adoption of seawater desalination to irrigate public areas [62]. Most of these sustainability measures were implemented in European countries due to the financial conditions made available by the EU Cohesion Policy.…”

Analysis of Waste Management in Supporting the Implementation of Sustainable Tourism

“…The study of sustainable tourism in several studies has begun to be applied in various aspects, starting from combining the tourism industry, technological advances, and ecological economic development (Yang et al, 2023), lifestyle entrepreneurship in supporting sustainable tourism (Antunes et al, 2023)and transportation in supporting sustainable tourism (Mazzulla et al, 2021). This topic has generated discussion and has been developed from different points of view, not only covering the social perspective of society, such as lifestyle in supporting sustainable tourism but also physical aspects such as infrastructure and supporting technology in implementing sustainable tourism.…”