Time.news from Rome: War against potholes in the Eternal City

2023-07-09 09:34:40

The mayor of Rome said a few days ago that he has decided to declare the war on potholes of the city roads. The issue is not trivial. Anyone who has had the privilege of residing in the Eternal City knows this. Potholes (‘buche’, in Italian) are one of the big problems in the capital Italian, and also one of the main shared causes of discontent of any Roman and roman.

It also happens in other cities. But here this plague has reached such a paroxysm that poetry and songs (many of them in dialect) denouncing the situation have even been written to de-dramatize it, mostly in an ironic key. Other citizens exhausted by years of negligencemismanagement and bureaucracyThey have even decided to put themselves to work.

In 2015, for example, the association ‘Tappami’ (Cover me) was born, made up of an army of citizens willing to end the sinkholes. He created it an entrepreneur and the task carried out, he said, was titanic. In the first five years of its existence alone, “volunteers fixed 5,000 potholes with more than 100 tons of asphalt cold”, communicated ‘Tappami’ in 2020. In truth, the Codacons consumer association itself came to count a pothole every 15 meters in the 8,000 kilometers of roads in the city and the Roman newspaper ‘Il Messaggero’ reported last year that the Japanese company Yokohama includes, for 30 years, a journey through the streets of Rome between the resistance tests for their new tire prototypes.

600 kilometers

With this situation as a preamble, Roberto Gualtieri, mayor since November 2021, has now presented an ambitious road rehabilitation project. As she has communicated, the objective is to renew, by 2024, 80% of the big streets and avenues that need to be rehabilitated, including sidewalks. Is or are 600 kilometers. So far, about 210 kilometers have been finished.

Rome’s fight against potholes.

The Office of the Ministry of Public Works of Rome believes that they are dealing with the problem “as it has not been done in 20 years”. This was repeated by the counselor Ornella Segnalini, in a message sent to this newspaper. “We will rehabilitate 800 kilometers of roads and they have been assigned €300 million for this program”, explained Segnalini.

According to the Roman council, in fact, the intention is now get to the bottom of the plagueespecially in view of the Jubilee that will begin at the end of 2024. For this reason, it is being repaved with works that reach up to a depth of 24 centimeters and, furthermore, a large part of the interventions are not carried out during the day. “The work is done overnight and they do not interrupt traffic, which is also a novelty”, Segnalini insisted.

Despite the skepticism of the Romans about the supposed inconvenience caused by the works, the city attends these days to this regeneration, of still uncertain outcome. Even so, more works will be launched in the coming months. According to the calendar, the council is also preparing to dig new tunnels underground, create new pedestrian zone and also restore old bridges, such as the Industria bridge, which, if all goes well, once renovated is expected to allow buses to pass through.

streets tour

A ‘sanpietrini’ Plan has even been created. These black basalt pavers Bevelled, which have been part of the recognizable landscape of the city since the 18th century, are being changed and improved in central areas such as Prati, the Via Giulia area and the famous Trastevere district. However, it is not the first time that the sanpietrini They are in the spotlight. In 2005, the then mayor Walter Veltroni even tried to strip the streets of the cobblestones to improve road traffic. It ended badly. Almost immediately they created citizen committees opposed to the initiative and carried out multiple protestswhich kept the population confronted, which left the measure incomplete.

Asphalting work in Rome.

The challenge is significant also because the history of mishaps caused by potholes in Rome is long. In the years of Mayor Virginia Raggi, of the 5 Star Movement, there were even close streets and reduce the limit of speed due to the countless accidents and the hours of traffic, while the tire sellers made their particular August. So much so that, in 2016, the city even estimated that the half of their buses had broken down by the sinkholes, which led to the creation of an emergency telephone line to report accidents, known as the ‘060-buche’ line.

The matter is also quite paradoxical if one remembers that the ancient romans were great builders of streets. That, from the year 300 BC. The objective was to quickly transport troops, goods and people. And they even managed to protect the state of the city’s roads with restrictions on the passage of commercial cars and chariots. In fact, problems they started later, with the fall of Romegiving way to centuries of stagnation in road infrastructure planning and maintenance.