Less traffic and safer roads for all

Road congestion is one of the main negative effects of the massive use of the private car for daily travel, all the more emblematic the more difficult it is to "eradicate" from our cities, often at the expense of huge investments of time, effort and money.

This negative effect translates into localized negative impacts, for example on air quality or noise, but also in a significant cost for the whole society due to the sheer loss of time that the traffic slowdown causes. In Milan, for example, a journey during the morning rush hour is on average 66% longer than in light traffic conditions, and almost 56% longer during the evening rush hour (TomTom, 2019).

The "wasted time", in addition to representing a source of daily stress, translates into significant economic damage, both for the lack of work productivity and for the social cost that this negative impact generates; in fact, time has an economic value (in English we speak of Value of Time or VoT) which, although variable according to the territorial context, the conditions of those who move and the reason why they move, has been estimated by various sources more than 10€ for each hour for the territory (PUMS MI, 2018).

In terms of use of space, the bicycle is considerably more efficient than a traditional motorized vehicle: at a speed of 15 km/h a person riding a bicycle occupies about 5 m2, while a person in a car traveling at 50 km/h h occupies about 140 m2. In addition to the problems deriving from traffic, road transport is responsible in the Metropolitan City of Milan alone for more than 18,000 injuries and more than 100 deaths as a result of the more than 13,000 road collisions that occur on its roads every year (POLIS, 2020).

Despite the strong reduction of the phenomenon in the territory, road collisions and their consequences today represent a significant psychological, moral and socio-economic damage that weighs on the entire community of the territory; in fact, in 2019 alone the phenomenon caused social costs of over 1 billion euros, of which about three quarters due to the high number of injured (processing from ISTAT data, 2019).

This figure, extremely high, is significant even if we "limit" ourselves to considering the phenomenon involving those who travel by bicycle, who are subject to an extremely high accident factor and, above all, to the severity of accidents. This determines a significant social cost, which does not weigh only on those who travel by bicycle but on the entire community.