The role of the transportation sector in achieving decarbonization goals through energy efficiency is increasingly crucial: according to the Green New Deal, greenhouse gas emissions from mobility must be reduced by 90% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels. This places the transportation sector as the second most important, after residential and ahead of industry and services, in the European Union’s decarbonization strategy.

Actions required to meet this goal must include a progressive phase-out of fossil fuels and the adoption of new approaches to sustainability in both urban and rural contexts. This article focuses on the reconstruction and modeling of extra-urban passenger mobility in Italy and proposes future scenarios for deep decarbonization of the sector. The starting point is a multimodal model that assesses choices among four transportation modes (road, railway, high-speed rail, air), based on an origin-destination matrix derived from data collected via mobile phone networks.

This model serves as the reference scenario representing current mobility demand. Building on this foundation, six scenarios were developed to evaluate the impact of adopting sustainable mobility measures, involving lifestyle changes, policy interventions, and infrastructural improvements, from both demand and supply perspectives in a post-pandemic context. Finally, the energy and environmental impacts of each scenario were assessed along with the potential applicability of the model to other cases.