Firenze, a sprawl city

How to tackle the congested accesses to Firenze from its functional area

I never thought of it. I really was surprised when I realized what a powerful tool a city can be to build sustainability. Why? Well, even if they occupy only about 2% of the global landmass, 50% of the global population live in the cities (70% as for Europe) consuming more than 75% of the world’s energy and being responsible for more than 70% of total CO2 emissions. Therefore their climate impact is massive! But the good news is that this urban density also represents an opportunity for local actions that summed up can generate a global benefit.

How does this contextualize to my hometown, Firenze? What are the challenges there? What can be improved? To start off, let’s have a look at a few indicators of the city:

CO2 emissions 2,5 million Tons
(34,5% transport, 30,2% residential activity, 27,8% Third sector)

Mobility shares (Istat 2001)
Walking 16%, Cycling 5%, Public transport 17%, Private motor vehicle 62%
(registered vehicles in 2010: Cars 206.000, 71.000 motorbikes / scooters, 28.100 other typologies)

What is immediately striking is the disproportion in the use of private transport compared to the other modal shares. One more thing is how – when looking at the typology of functional urban area – the numbers at stake increase dramatically. The functional urban area is determined by “its labour market basin and by the mobility patterns of commuters, and includes the wider urban system of nearby towns and villages that are highly economically and socially dependent on a major urban centre” according to the definition of the EU Regional Policy in its Cities of Tomorrow report [link].

The definition mentions mobility patterns and commuter flows. Here they are: of the total transfers in Firenze on a working day, 51,6% start and end within the city, 10,5% are outbound flows, 37,9% are entering flows. To the 139.000 people moving within the city everyday to go to study or work, there are additional 102.000 coming from outside (IRPET report 2008).

A major cause of this situation is Firenze’s random and not planned expansion: it is a clear example of a sprawl city. According to OECD Firenze in 2006 had a sprawl index of 3,47% ranking 33 worldwide. A sprawling city “creates major and severe impacts in relation to a variety of environmental, social and economic issues affecting not only the city and its region but also the surrounding rural areas” ( “Urban Sprawl in Europe – The Ignored Challenge” report by the European Environment Agency ). Sprawl creates car-dependent citizens and increases greenhouse-gas emissions. In detail: “Urban sprawl… is one of the main threats to sustainable territorial development; public services are more costly and difficult to provide, natural resources are overexploited, public transport networks are insufficient and car reliance and congestion in and around cities are heavy”. (EU Commission report 2011 Cities of Tomorrow)

If on top of this we consider the number of tourists attracted by Firenze’s artistic heritage (8 million in 2012, 75% from abroad; data from www.provincia.fi.it ) what does this cause? What are the consequences of this framework? A lot of private traffic, congested accesses to the city, more pollution and emissions. The annual cost of fuel, emissions and time lost in traffic per capita in Florence equals 1365€ (estimate by Vision & Value, data by Octo Telematics and ACI, MISE, Istat, ICE, in 2010)

If traffic congestion is an important issue that is facing Firenze (as also stated by Firenze’s Structural strategic long term Plan approved in 2010 by the municipality) and an obstacle towards sustainability, what can be done about it? I will make an hypothetical exercise, supposing that Firenze won the bid for the Olympic Games and it shall organize the next edition. A sport event of this dimension is a huge catalyzer of resources and funds: how could a part of these funds be used to improve the city urban planning and make it more sustainable?

Intuitively, it seems evident how the focus should be both on the city and on the whole of the functional area. Already decreasing by 15% the flow of inbound traffic, the situation would sensibly improve without impacting the economy.

If funds were available, integrated and correlated actions would be necessary in order to change and rebalance the modal shares of mobility, increase the public transport and find solutions to make smoother the private one.

The public transport should provide additional services, ensure quality, regularity, adequacy to the flows and capacity to respect the timetable. Increase bus city lines do not comply with these requirements. Additional challenges are set by the lack of a ring road and the relative small size of its streets, often not large enough to enable separate dedicated lanes for the public transport. So more city buses might get stuck in the traffic anyway.

One improvement to the urban mobility would be driven by implementing the planned additional two tram lines: only one line existing at now, open in 2010. (Zurich extensive tram and public transport network is a successful example in this direction: there are more tram monthly tickets than driving licenses and it is experiencing an inversion of tendency with people who moved back to live in the city).

Another way – which proved to be efficient as a temporary solution during the recent World Road Cycling Championships when many streets were completely closed to the traffic due to the races – would be to use the existing railway system and the small urban train stations to increase the connections between the outskirts and various strategic city locations, also buying new train coaches, and use it as a regular urban service. Yet, that was an extraordinary solution. At the moment the same railway lines are used by local trains as well by the high speed ones. To make it possible to implement it, it is necessary to separate the bypass high-speed line from the urban line. How? Like it has been done in Bologna and like they have planned to do also in Firenze where the works for a new, dedicated, underground train station for high speed trains have started.

Another option within the city could be to increase and make more structured a low cost bike sharing service (which is at an early stage and not yet automated) integrated into the city’s public transport system on the example of Barcelona and Paris (C40 Cities examples).

As for the sprawl issue, solutions could be to launch campaigns to promote carpooling (whose use nowadays is facilitated by the technology as witnessed by some Apps for smartphones), or evaluate experiences of increased bus service capillarity on the examples of the sprawling network of bus lines of Sao Paolo in Brazil (ICLEI Network).

Maybe the solutions are already out there. Firenze is already moving on. It signed the European movement Covenant of Mayors, and committed to increasing energy efficiency and use of renewable energy sources on its territory to reduce a 20% CO2 reduction objective by 2020. Maybe if the necessary funds were available it would be possible to accelerate the sustainability improvement process – part of which sprawled Firenze has already started – and help mitigate its climate impact.

Comments Off on Firenze, a sprawl city / 13 Dec 2013 por guidopreti
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