Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI) manages more than two thousand stations, each with complex infrastructure, divided in 15 different management areas. The station updates also had to keep its huge volume of 1.3 Billion transiting people moving as the updates were made. In Italy, approximately 10,000 trains run every day, carrying over 2 million passengers.
RFI
Italy is investing billions to modernize its century-old railway network in one of Europe’s largest infrastructure projects. The plan includes renovating some 600 stations and building dozens more along new rail corridors. It’s more than an infrastructure upgrade; it’s a bold strategy to reconnect communities and fuel nationwide economic growth.
How will railway leaders deliver on such an ambitious investment? By reimagining cities and their stations through data-rich maps.
Planners at Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (RFI), the public company that manages Italy’s railway network, are using mapping and analytics to sharpen their understanding of local populations and transit patterns. Their maps reveal how people move, what surrounds each station, and what’s missing—critical information RFI teams use to design custom solutions for each location.
“Every city has its own needs, and every city deserves its own solutions,” said Luigi Contestabile, head of station services planning and development for RFI. “But everywhere, a well-developed train station boosts the economy and improves the livability of the surrounding areas.”
The stakes are enormous and the scale demands precision traditional planning methods can’t deliver. RFI’s hyper-local approach – embedding location intelligence into strategic decision-making – reveals patterns business intelligence tools miss, like why a station goes unused despite nearby population density.
Consider Roma Trastevere, a station near Rome’s city center last renovated in 1911. Research shows Italian train riders will typically tolerate a 15-minute walk to stations. But RFI’s mapping platform revealed pedestrians from neighborhoods to the south faced a 30-minute trek along busy streets to reach the main entrance. Despite the station’s bustling northern side, the configuration was turning away thousands of daily riders.
“We were forgetting all the people that lived and worked around there,” Contestabile said.
Location-specific analysis helped planners convince rail leaders and city authorities to dig under ancient streets and build a tunnel, opening the station to the south end and reconnecting overlooked neighborhoods. The tunnel prevented what would have been a costly mistake: a renovated station that continued losing thousands of riders daily.
“If we hadn’t had this way of looking at the city, we would have never made that underpass,” Contestabile said.
THIS DATA-DRIVEN FOCUS reflects RFI’s conviction that rail stations aren’t just transportation nodes; they should be vibrant hubs of economic and civic activity, thoughtfully woven into surrounding communities. For decades, rail infrastructure managers have focused attention on tracks, leaving stations a bit in the shadows. Location intelligence is changing that thinking.
RFI’s approach reflects a growing trend across organizations globally: embedding mapping and analytics into critical business decisions. RFI created an advanced mapping and analytics platform, integrating volumes of data capturing environmental, mobility, economic, and sociodemographic details. For any given station, planners can visualize over 400 data layers: train routes, bus network, taxi stands, crime rates, EV charging stations, hospitals, schools, businesses, museums, tourist destinations, and UNESCO heritage sites.
As the station work advanced, the scope expanded to become a location intelligence hub for many decisions.
RFI
The maps give planners insight to match amenities to context. A station near a university gets low‑cost cafés and study spaces; one near a major museum includes an information booth, luggage storage, and a gift shop. In smaller towns, upgrades include coworking spaces, pharmacies, and health clinics.
ITALY’S RAIL MAPS HAVE EVOLVED into a comprehensive view of the entire Italian train network: over 18,000 kilometers of railway lines and thousands of buildings, level crossings, tunnels, and bridges. As Contestabile’s teams continue to bring more stations into the system, they’re also gaining visibility indoors. Detailed digital models, or digital twins, of station interiors allow RFI to test scenarios and anticipate challenges in 3D before making infrastructure investments.
By integrating building information modeling (BIM) software with geographic information systems (GIS) software, decisions about each station’s interior are directly informed by the surroundings. Planners can see how a proposed station entrance might affect pedestrian flow or impact environmental features.
Planners at RFI, the public company that manages Italy’s railway network, use mapping and analytics to sharpen their understanding of local populations and transit patterns. For instance, research showed that at a station near Rome’s city center, Italian train riders will typically tolerate a 15-minute walk. But RFI’s mapping platform revealed pedestrians from neighborhoods to the south faced a 30-minute trek to reach the main entrance. Despite the station’s bustling northern side, the configuration was turning away thousands of daily riders.
Esri
“In Italy, they live in osmosis together,” Contestabile said of stations and their surroundings. “You can’t make a station work if you don’t understand what’s outside of it.”
And you don’t understand what’s outside of it without maps.