The Linate-San Babila metro is thanks to the Objective law of the Berlusconi government

To the director – The long queues at Linate airport, the long queues of people waiting for a taxi, the systematic strike always by taxis or public transport, in short, a national and international airport which was not functionally connected to a large metropolitan area of the country like Milan; that is, it was not connected through an efficient and effective public service with the city centre. Well, from July 4 with the opening of the Linate – San Babila connection this bad image of a European metropolis like Milan has disappeared.

Yet Linate has a flow that in 2022 had exceeded 8 million passengers but without the Objective law this figure would have remained only a worrying indicator of a disservice that one of the most advanced cities in the country had until 21 December 2001. Yes, because that day the government, chaired by Silvio Berlusconiapproved a bill proposed by the Minister of Infrastructure and Transport Peter Lunardi within which the M4 underground line was indicated as a strategic work and that bill, among other things the first bill that organically contemplated the essential works to be carried out in the country, practically revolutionized the country’s infrastructural offer and gave to the city of Milan a measurable essentiality, that of:

• Avoid the use of private cars in the connection between Linate and the center with the simultaneous production of CO2
• Avoid the deadweight loss of a variable threshold between 40 and 50 minutes in work activities due to waiting for taxis or traditional public connections
• Give the city a metropolitan segment which, through the connection to the Forlanini station, makes the entire metropolitan system more organic and complete

Why did I want to once again remember this event? Because the historical memory of this country is short and forget that this work would have been completed sooner if the successive governments from 2015 onwards had not invoked the project review tool or had not deliberately delayed the financial transfers under the responsibility of the central body.

But now that the M4 is working, perhaps it would be good to say that not having been able to dispose of this work at least ten years earlier, and not having been able to do it due to the mental masturbation of those in government, has produced damage which, as I said before, in terms of CO2 and lack of work activity, it reaches very significant economic thresholds.

Now, however, I would like to remind Mayor Sala, to whom I am bound by an old friendship, that with the M4 Line and the M5 Line, the Objective law has made it possible to truly reinvent the city; while to the political alignments that are perhaps ashamed to admit it, I am referring in particular to the 5 Star Movement, which these two axes they oppose allow Milan to be that European city that everyone envies us and this widely recognized merit must be attributed to one strategic intuition such as the Strategic Infrastructure Programme included in the law Objective.

I know it’s annoying that this law was not even shared and appreciated by the Democratic Party but this is part of the democratic debate, but what is important is to recognize over time, and now more than 20 years have passed, that the opening of the M4 represents the creation of a key piece of that strategic mosaic that has been the Objective law, a mosaic that remains and I think will remain the only concrete planning reference over time.

Perhaps it would be useful for the current government, directly engaged in the undeniable need to “do”, i.e. to transform design documents into finished works, to rediscover the relevance and incisiveness of the Objective law and use a key tool that has made possible both the progress of the works and the overcoming of critical issues: I am referring to the instrument of the General Framework Agreement between the state and the individual regions.

Thanks to this instrument, i.e. the agreement between the government and the Lombardy region signed in 2003, it was possible to continue the work on both the M5 and the M4 even in the absence of financial coverage, absence of coverage linked to incomprehensible second thoughts of the shift managers of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport.

I know maybe I’m being too repetitive but remembering a positive past maybe it’s good for everyone.