Cagliari ranks third in Italy among metropolitan capitals with the highest car ownership rate per capita . This is according to ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics) in a report on vehicle ownership for 2024, the year in which Italy was the highest in the European Union, with 701 cars per thousand inhabitants compared to the European average of 578.
With 709 cars per thousand inhabitants , Cagliari is among the large cities most exposed to the environmental pressure of traffic , with a polluting potential of the vehicles in circulation which, although decreasing, remains high.
The report, comparing traffic intensity and polluting emissions, reveals that the Sardinian capital, along with Palermo and Messina, and after Naples and Catania, presents the most unfavorable combinations.
Among the data to consider from a pollution perspective, the fact that in 2024, traditional fuels (petrol and diesel) will still represent approximately 80% of cars, especially in the case of metropolitan capitals, with petrol cars representing the largest group (46.5% in the capital municipalities as a whole), even if their share has been decreasing, on average, by 0.8 percentage points per year since 2015.
In 2024, low-emission cars will account for 10.8% of the islands. Hybrid cars, on the other hand, will account for 8.8% of all provincial capitals, and electric cars will account for just 0.8%.
Among other problems is the low turnover of the vehicle fleet: in the provincial capitals as a whole, nearly two out of three cars (64.3%) are 8 years old or older, and the remainder are split almost equally between the 3-year-old and 4-to-7 age groups (17.7%). Furthermore, approximately 40% of cars are between 8 and 19 years old.
Just a few days ago, the pollution alarm in Cagliari was raised by Legambiente's "Bon'aria di Sardegna" report, which revealed a worrying picture regarding fine particulate matter (PM10). Less than a third of the city's monitoring stations are below WHO limits, and five exceed EU 2030 standards. Furthermore, Cagliari will have to reduce PM10 concentrations by nearly 30% over the next four years to remain within the limits by 2030.
(Unioneonline)