[URBAN MOBILITY]
Costs of urban transport in Italy
Two surveys highlight the costs in terms of time and money met by Italian car drivers due to congestion and poor traffic management
Forty billion Euro a year. This is the sum paid by Italian motorists due to poor traffic management. The time lost in urban congestion, bottled in cars is paid for dearly according to a survey carried out in four major Italian cities (Rome, Milan, Turin and Genoa) by the Italian Automobile Club. This users organisation analyzed data collected from vehicles equipped with GPS location devices. The picture emerging from this study unveils some disturbing realities. Roman and Milanese car drivers spend more than 500 hours a year in their cars. And it takes them about 60 minutes for an average town travel, half of it lost in jams and slowdowns.
The situation isn’t less unsettling in smaller towns. Turinese, for example, spend 450 hours each year in their cars and the Genoese 380. In recent years According to ACI, local governments have not done much: no parking, no improvements to the infrastructure and no attempts to reduce the fleet. In Italy today there are more than 35 million cars. In the 60's the Italian car fleet accounted for 1.9 million, increasing to 24 million in 1986 and to 30 million ten years ago. Whilst the fleet has grown immensely, the infrastructure has not followed accordingly.
The Italian Automobile Club proposes to better manage the information regarding traffic in cities. According to ACI this could allow for a reduction up to 40% congestion levels, equal to 16 billion Euro.
Another survey, carried out by independent consultants Vision&Value and discussed last March at a conference in Naples on the consequences of pollution, comes to similar conclusions. According to the authors Francesco Grillo and Gabriele Cetorelli, in Italy’s ten largest cities and their provinces, traffic gobbles up almost an hour a day of everyone’s time, and costs its citizens a total of 27 billion Euro each year. To get some idea of the amount, the total paid to Italian workers in 2008 in the form of Christmas bonuses was 27 billion Euro. It was also the total of evaded tax identified by the customs police, and the revenue of the entire Lufthansa group.
Both surveys reckon that an hour spent in traffic is worth the value we would have produced if we had been working in the office and not sitting waiting for the lights to turn green. Most of the time, traffic jams do not actually eat into work time, which can always be made up, but our free time, which may not have a cash value but is still worth something.
This is part of the reason of the staggering PTW usage in Italian cities, where the contribution of this transport mode to total mobility accounts to up to 20% in certain cases.
[INDEX]
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