How innovation, data and transport integration allow tourist traffic to be managed and services for the local community to be strengthened
Lake Como has always been a fundamentally important resource for the local area. Once this was because it was a communications and work route: the lake was a natural road along which people, goods and the economy travelled. Now it is also an extraordinary tourism driver capable of attracting visitors from all over the world. And it’s easy to see why: quite simply Lake Como is even more beautiful seen from the lake itself. Alongside the tourism dimension lake transport also plays an important part in the everyday lives of local people too, however. Plenty of people use the boats for their daily commutes, confirming the strategic importance of the service for local transport. It is precisely for this reason that the lake’s growing attractions constitute a great opportunity to improve and strengthen the Navigazione system. A modern service has to be increasingly flexible, capable of adapting to traffic flows both in capacity and stops and route management terms, responding effectively to the needs of residents and visitors alike. At the same time navigation is potentially a valuable tool with which to foster a more balanced use of the lake, accompanying visitors to less well known places and improving distribution of tourists across the area. This is a goal which requires an integrated transport vision in which boats increasingly dialogue with other transport systems, from the starting point of road transport. This is the direction Como province is moving and, together with Lecco and Sondrio, the metropolitan city of Milan and Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana, it will therefore be taking part in the Interreg project DQuaDLA, co-ordinated by Politecnico di Milano. The project is developing data-based tools to monitor and manage tourist traffic, identifying strategies capable of directing visitors to alternative destinations and promoting the area’s less well known patrimony. In this context, a modern, capillary and integrated Navigazione is the linchpin to local growth, improving residents’ living standards and the Lake Como visitor experience at the same time.
