This is a project for "Cities for our future challenge" 2018 by RICS.

It aims to answer at the following question: "How can cities like Milan reduce the space required for car parking to make more room for green spaces or affordable housing?".
 

We decided to work on the city of Milan because we can observe it in our everyday life and we studied its structure and issues with a very practical approach.

The aim of this project is to reduce the spread spaces occupied by cars and devoted to car parking, so that it can be dedicated to host green areas and some affordable services for citizen.

 

Background
 

In Milan there are still many citizens that prefer using their own cars instead of public transportation means.

The reasons of this are different and depend on several personal factors but also on public means inefficiency or limitations.

Such a behavior causes problems to the city; among them we analyzed the following:

- Traffic congestion: Milan is the most congested city in Italy and the country is at the tenth place in

Europe.

- Air pollution: in 2017 Milan had 97 days of air pollution above the admitted limits.

- Huge space occupied by cars: in particular in the historical districts, most houses are not provided with underground parking and so cars are parked in the streets or in dedicated spaces creating an unpleasant effect and relevant accessibility problems.

Our solution
 

In order to reduce the number of cars in Milan we developed an application, called PickApp.

It allows people to share their private cars with people doing the same travel.

This service can be used for casual track or daily (e.g. by people going to work).

It also allows to book cars and bike parking in advance so to avoid stress and time loss.

Furthermore, through the application is possible to get in touch and organize many events located in the places obtained through car reduction and to exploit interesting promotions.

Thanks to PickApp the number of cars will be dramatically reduced so it will be possible to develop other 4 element of our project:

- Convertible parking: the idea stems from an observation of some parking in Milan which have different connotation according to the hour of the day.

We redesigned these areas by adding a green space, a smart bike parking (producing solar energy and bookable through PickApp) and, most of all, a “convertible space” that can be devoted to be a car parking or to host other activities (e.g. street food, open air cinema, silent disco) according to the hour of the day.

- Smart exchange parking: we introduced smart bike parking, green pavement and photovoltaic covering in 19 exchange parking at the margin of the city to encourage commuter to use bikes.

- New connection bike paths: we designed new bike paths to connect the existing ones into a safe network.

- Central parking network: we prepared significant discounts and promotions for PickApp members using specific central and semi central parking in the city.