Redesigning Florence

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Being an urban planning student I’ve been asked multiple times by Italians and Americans in Florence how I would redesign the city. To us Americans we may think why there should even be a reason to redesign this picturesque city with its even roofline, famous landmarks, exquisite architecture, and lively street life. However, once you start ingraining yourself in Italian culture you slowly start to hear how comparable Florentine traffic is to Milanese and Roman gridlock.

Remember that, those Italian cities are larger than Florence (Milan’s population is 10 times the size of our beautiful Firenze).

And once you move here you see it. For a city of only 300,000 the gridlock is on par with Atlanta’s or Austin’s. Check out these photos below.

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Before I begin, what’s key to my answer is not so much redesigning but about retrofitting Florence.  Redesigning implies razing what’s present to the ground and building it up from scratch whereas retrofitting is more about fitting new systems into what is already present – i.e. the majority of what planners are taught in planning school.

Living with Florentines is the best way to get the daily scoop on the state of the city’s transportation situation.  My host mom has mentioned that what takes 5 minutes in car without traffic will take you an hour during rush hour.  AN HOUR. Parking is another beast.  It’s also taken my host family an hour to find a parking spot.  Yes again, AN HOUR.  Honestly this is something unprecedented that I’ve never seen or heard of before in a city of this size.

With regards to parking, my host family has also told me that Florence is one of the only Italian cities where cars are used more so the get around the historic center, main station, and inner suburbs.  To avoid traffic, Italian cities usually build huge underground parking complexes near transportation arteries (bus or trams mainly) and limit the cars that can go in the afore mentioned areas (usually by license plate number) encouraging people to use public transit, therefore decongesting the city.   Florence doesn’t have this parking system though and since the majority of Florentines in the center use cars there’s a huge parking demand.

You may be thinking why doesn’t Florence just expand its roads. Well, if you do you destroy precious buildings, history, and culture, ruining a city’s character. And this is definitely important in Italy because urban character is of major importance to one of the nation’s largest industries – tourism. And even if you did expand the roads like we do in America it wouldn’t solve the problem. It would just increase the car volume that can move through the city, encouraging more people to rely on cars. Here’s a link to a study done on how widening roads actually increases traffic.

Based on my two years in school, I’ve noticed that planners today are focusing more and more on planning for the person, not the car, by planning bus or train lines instead of highway construction, or retrofitting bike lanes, sidewalks, and street trees instead of street expansion. This then encourages people to travel shorter distances, localizing jobs instead of encouraging people to traverse a whole metropolitan area during their commute. In the US this localizing idea is more “pie in the sky” (even though it shouldn’t be because it leads to the above issues) because of the market forces that shapes our cities, but in Europe it’s easier to do because of previously existing urban fabrics.

Florence as a whole is very bikeable and walkable since it’s so dense, but alternative transportation infrastructure is few and far between and mainly composed of inefficient and uncomprehensive bus lines which get trapped in the traffic.  FAIL.  Also, safety-wise it would be a mess to bike from the burbs to the center.  However, my visit to Bologna earlier this semester gave me the opportunity to see a comprehensive biking system that covered the whole city and particularly in a way that encouraged biking – multiple green ways bypassed roads altogether to connect apartment complexes and work places by snaking through parks and open/unused city spaces.  

The photo below shows one of Bologna’s many greenways retrofitted inside an avenue’s median.  Even though traffic whizzes by you, you still feel safe because speed limits are lower than in the U.S. and you have a wall of trees as a cushion between you and the cars.

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Just this itself could calm much traffic because a bike, like a car, let’s one localize trips. Someone might not choose to use public transit because it doesn’t take you directly from point A to point B, but bikes make transit more convenient.  With a bike one could go quickly to a bus stop that’s maybe a mile away and take the bus to work instead of taking a car down the same road as a bus.  

This could definitely help remove car users in the center city and inner suburbs, but, since Florence is much larger than Bologna one would need to incorporate some form of rail along major avenues to encourage people living farther out to get out of the car and on their feet.  

Rail can bypass traffic altogether, moving people faster through a city. Thankfully a tram system is finally being incorporated into Florence’s city grid, which my host family has said has already greatly reduced traffic in the areas it reaches. Line 2 was inaugurated on February 11, 2020 and is expected to decrease traffic congestion by 5700 cars and 2400 motorbikes daily. That’s a total of 13 million passengers annually on a single tram line. Line 1 and 3 which have already been in place carry around 24 million passenger annually.

On this post, I don’t have the time to fully explain the issues tram construction has caused here, but to keep it short, if city officials had planned well enough, tram construction could have barely disrupted Florence’s traffic flow.  Instead it’s lead to an incredible number of standstills (the epitome of Italian political inefficiency). 

All in all, Florence can greatly decongest itself while keeping its prized possession – it’s stunning Renaissance center and calm, residential character.  How to keep this though should be based on a pedestrian-focused transit system that requires retrofitting biking infrastructure and arterial transit lines to create centric-peripheral connections within the metro area.  Based on how things are going I think Florence is on the right track. Only time will tell!

Sources

Firenze Fra Le Citta Piu Congestionate. 2015. Firenze. Firenzetoday.it.

Ferrara, Ernesto. “Firenze in sei anni stesso traffico ma che chaos muoversi.” Firenze.repubblica.it, 2016. https://firenze.repubblica.it/cronaca/2016/10/26/news/firenze_in_sei_anni_stesso_traffico_ma_molto_piu_lento-150577574/

Traffico Firenze, Stella (FI): “E’ emergenza rivedere orari ztl, e fare accordo con Ferrovie per uso stazioni metropolitane.” tgregione.it, 2018. https://www.tgregione.it/traffico-firenze-stella-fi-e-emergenza-rivedere-orari-ztl-e-fare-accordo-con-ferrovie-per-uso-stazioni-metropolitane/

Opening of Line 2 of Florence’s Tram System. 2019. cmbcarpi.com. https://www.cmbcarpi.com/en/news/opening-line-2-florence-tram-system/

Trams in Florence. 2019. wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trams_in_Florence