Milan will be the second "City 30" in Italy, after Bologna.
The City Council has approved a majority agenda inviting the mayor, Beppe Sala, and his council to establish the speed limit in urban areas at 30 kilometers per hour starting from 1 January 2024 . A roof that will apply throughout the city and not just in certain areas as is the case today.
A special budget has been set aside for the project, as stated in the agenda approved by the Palazzo Marino hall: bringing the maximum speed limit to 30 per hour in the city should reduce road accidents and cause fewer deaths on the streets .
As the first signatory of the document, councilor Marco Mazzei of the Sala List explained in the courtroom, «the impact between a car traveling at 50 kilometers per hour and a pedestrian or a cyclist is almost always fatal for the light road user , and on the contrary the impact at 30 kilometers is almost never lethal and offers ample reassurance on the lesser seriousness of the consequences ».
According to Aci-Istat data, reported in the agenda, over 70% of accidents in Italy occur in cities and among the first causes of all, there is precisely excess speed. Accidents in urban areas cause 43.9% of deaths and 69.7% of injuries.
Reducing speed in the city is an objective "that we are trying to pursue and achieve - underlined the councilor for Mobility of the Municipality Arianna Censi -. It is from here that the culture of a city is built and it is already the strategy of many European cities».
In Europe, it is Paris and Brussels that have imposed the urban limit of 30 kilometers per hour , the first since August 2021 and the second since January 2021. After the first year of experimentation, the deaths on the roads have more than halved and the injured serious significantly reduced. Other European cities have made and are making similar choices, including: Graz, Grenoble, Helsinki, Valencia, Zurich, Lille, Bilbao .
(Unioneonline/D)
