ZTL
It’s not that you don’t speak Italian…
“ZTL” is an Italian administrative acronym for “Zona di Traffico Limitato” – “Limited Traffic Zone.” The photograph above shows the entry to one of these in a Southern Italian town. Unless you live there and just “know,” it would require a watch, a calendar, either a lawyer or pocket copy of the Civic Code and several minutes of calculations to understand whether you can actually go into it with your automobile.
This may just seem like inept administration, but the Italians know better. There are lots of good reasons to reduce traffic into and out of Italian city centers, but the most important of all is that, simply, it makes a great deal of money for strapped local government.
The Italian Automobile Club – “ACI” – has just released the results of a study showing that traffic fines are now the single largest source of independent income – that is, outside of failing subsidies from the national government – financing municipal administrations. In the country’s provincial capitals alone more than ten million traffic fines of one kind or another are handed out each year, about 26 thousand a day.
Since we began this note by backing into the ZTL theme, it may not be entirely a surprise to learn that “old fashioned” parking tickets are no longer the largest source of income from fines – and by a long way. In fact, it now turns out that about 5.7 million of those tickets we just mentioned above are written for driving in a limited traffic zone. On average, these cost about 68 euro each – at the moment, that is roughly $105. Instead, only about 2.7 million parking tickets are now issued annually, and their unit “price” is much lower.
In other words, making traffic circulation as complex and confusing as possible is not only a paying proposition for city governments, it is a necessary one. It covers the bills. The country’s national government regularly pretends to rein in spending – but largely by failing to finance municipal activities that are required by law. Local governments have almost no powers of autonomous taxation and nearly the only way they have to raise that cash is by cheating their citizens.
Americans are familiar enough with the little speed trap towns that used to dot the South and the Southern Midwest – still do probably. This is something like that, but on a national scale. Limited traffic or other kinds of controlled access zones are blooming in huge profusion in most Italian cities. Some areas, for instance, might be open only to vehicles with even-numbered license plates on odd-numbered days of the month. That would be to cut exhaust emissions…
Much of this is of course nominally for “ecological” reasons, smog and all that, but if that were truly the case it would make little sense to shape these zones in such a way that there is no legal way at all to get from “here” to “there” without driving many kilometers out of the way. ZTLs requiring you to either risk a dash across a 100 yard strip or spend half an hour driving around them – as you are instead supposed to – are common, as is the fact that for the most part there is now no legitimate way at all to drive across the center of a city; you can only go around.
The world is changing and Anglo-Saxons who once believed that when their government appeared to cheat them it was only the result of inept legislators and stupid administrators – bad management, one way or the other – may now be beginning to slowly catch on. The Italians have always known better. They expect their Government and the other principal institutions, big banks, the utilities and so on, to deliberately and knowingly screw them.
Sometimes things get out of hand. In a lesser scandal in Lombardy recently, a half dozen smaller city administrations were caught intentionally rigging stop lights so that it was hardly possible not to “run” them. This came out when there was a dramatic rash of “rear-ender” traffic accidents as drivers attempted desperately to stop as the lights changed unpredictably.
It may sound peculiar to readers in other countries to know there was some relief in the news that in this particular case the guilty parties were not so much the governments themselves as local police chiefs on the make. They were getting kick-backs from service companies managing the ticketing process and had an interest in issuing as many of them as possible.
Private, or at least “less public,” institutional entities have not shown nobler behavior. Telecom Italia, the former State telephone monopoly, was caught red-handed a few years ago using testing circuits to load customer bills with phone calls that had never been made. The sums involved were not great on an individual level, but the company was rigging the metering on, at that time, something like 25 million individual residential contracts.
Several big banks too have been found in recent years to have been systematically lacing client statements with completely false charges charges covering oh, an oil change for the vault or something. If you catch on, or even just go into your branch office to ask about the charge, they will be delighted to fix the “regrettable error,” leaving you a tiny victory to feel good about, as if it wasn’t already your money – but most people hardly glance at their statement.
Since, as hotel marketing types know, cheerfully and rapidly fixing bad service is an even more effective means of increasing customer fidelity than offering good service in the first place, the banks could hardly lose either way…
Once again, rather like in the Telecom case, the sums were carefully set to be just below the “not quite worth bothering about” threshold. In the instance of the banks, that was about at the equivalent of US $25 per customer.
It is very easy to point out, as foreign critics often do, that many of the problems in Italian society stem from the unwillingness of the citizens of this country to cooperate in an effective way in and through the operation of their national institutions. What may not always be made quite so clear is that they have excellent reasons not to do so.