The great plan to free Rome from traffic

When last year they told me the plan of the Mobility councilor of the Municipality of Rome Eugenio Patane to drastically reduce the cars on the road, I thought back to when I began my career as a reporter, almost forty years ago. At the time there was another councilor for mobility who had made up his mind to solve the traffic problem in Rome with the so-called “iron cure”, that is, by strengthening the railway ring. To make a plan, he had even called a German super expert who was greeted with great curiosity which, however, soon became caustic skepticism. We are the city of “America’, Tarzan faces” as one of Alberto Sordi’s characters said. In short, no one remembers that guru anymore, but the traffic on the other hand has gotten worse.

Since then the best Mobility councilors, paradoxically, are those who have done nothing, those who have shown that they consider Roman traffic as an inescapable calamity against which it is useless to agitate. This is why the ambition of Eugenio Patanè – someone who has been studying these problems for years – initially seemed rash to me: that plan, I said to myself, will never pass. Now the protests are starting: there are those who are organizing to sabotage the electronic gates of the green band and those who have printed crusader T-shirts. They say they can’t do without a car and they can’t buy a new, less polluting one, not even with incentives. Many difficulties are real and must be resolved. But what are we talking about when we talk about traffic in Rome? Of a meaningless thing that damages our health every day. Cars travel an average of 5.9 kilometers per day – a distance that we could safely cover by walking, with health benefits – to one average speed of 23.5 kilometers per hour (basically like a bike). The rest of the time, 96 percent of the time, the cars are parked.

We live in this tangle of metal sheets and polluting particles, we breathe it, we get sick. Life goes by and we are standing in line. Resign yourself to never change. And yet when you travel around Europe you discover cities where cars have drastically reduced them and where the quality of life has grown. People get around on foot, by bike or on public transport and there is an air of liberation. Change is possible. Change is good for everyone. We need to do it well, we need to listen and solve the problems that each transition entails. And above all, don’t give up.