Transport, unsustainable costs for five million families

MILAN – The cost of transport is a problem for almost one in five families. This is highlighted by a study commissioned by Transport & Environment (T&E), a European organization for the decarbonisation of transport, to TESSA, a research agency of the University of Tuscia.

In fact, there are approximately 4.9 million, 18.46% of the total, Italian families who allocate a percentage at least double the national median to mobility in their spending budget. Where public transport is lacking, the car is a necessity even for the poorest families; and with a fleet still powered 99.3% by fossil fuels, any increase in fuel prices is a very heavy burden on their budgets.

For some, car ownership is a necessity and not a choice. In metropolitan cities, where there is more widespread public transport, the poorest families own 0.5 cars on average; in municipalities under 50,000 inhabitants it does not fall below 0.9, not even in the lowest income decile.

"In Italy, mobility is not neutral ground: it multiplies economic and territorial inequalities that already exist - declares Esther Marchetti, Clean Transport Advocacy Manager of T&E Italia - Millions of families do not use the car by choice but because they have no alternatives and pay the price for energy cost shocks that we cannot control. Two crises in four years demonstrate a structural fragility, that of a fossil mobility model, which weighs on family budgets, on the climate and on everyone's health. Spending on transport is in growth. In 2024 it was 2997 euros per month per family, equal to 10.78% of the budget. Just four years earlier it was 9.32% compared to one of the weakest wage dynamics in Europe. According to the study, there are 643,189 families included in the poorest segments of the population (in the top three income deciles) for which fuel has a critical impact, almost half of them concentrated (47.7%) in Sicily, Puglia, Campania and Calabria concentrate almost half (47.7%) of these vulnerable nuclei.