Tram-train line as infrastructural corridor for the requalification of Pontina Bioregion

Many cities across the world are implementing plans to reduce the private road mobility, encouraging the modal shift to public transport. The policies deployed concern both the improvement of public transport and the implementation of stringent measures on the movement of cars, especially in the city centre. In particular, a significant in-depth examination should be conducted on the theme of urban transformation aimed at residential buildings densification, transformations that are able to limit and contrast the effects of urban sprawl, which are reflected in the choice of citizens transport mode for their journeys. In scientific literature, many authors make reference to the well-established American practice of Transit Oriented Development (T.O.D.). This practice that is able to achieve the goals, previously cited, of modal shift towards means of collective transportation, especially rail transport and urban regeneration through the main points of the T.O.D. that consider the station, which also has the function of park and ride stations, the main pivot from which start the regeneration of the whole area. The station then becomes a linkage between the transport network and the urban space, a much more articulated and complex way compared to the only transport functionality. In the Transit Oriented Development, the strategy for the government of urban transformation is developed within the areas of influence of the stations, seen as the access point to the infrastructures network. The areas around the station, then, become attractive, because they offer obvious location advantages, which after having been monetized as real benefit, could be used to cover part of the construction costs, as happens in the value capture mechanisms. Value capture, is the tool by which is possible to finance part of the costs of the infrastructure by intercepting the added value of real estate that are located at a certain distance from the railway station. Value capture tools are many and often different from each other, since they depend largely on socio-economic conditions and particularly on tax system and local settlement system. For these reasons, in this paper the author chose the infrastructural corridor as the main research line. Infrastructural corridors, simultaneously embrace the necessity of modal shift to public and sustainable means of transport and the redesign of the urban shape. Indeed, these corridors do not have to be thought exclusively in terms of key transport, or as the set of transport infrastructures linking towns and cities, but also as an urban regeneration axis and environmental rehabilitation, the latter can be achieved also by introducing the concept of Bioregion. After describing an European case study, the Ørestad line in Copenhagen, Denmark, about the application of T.O.D. and land value capture, the focus, in this paper, will be directed on the description of the analysis regarding the project of a railway system, served by tram-train, in Pontina Bioregion. The project, thought like a new infrastructural corridor in this territory, introduces also actions directed to the revaluation of the whole area, through the requalification of the hill old towns, the transition to low carbon mobility and the safeguard of the natural environment.