Milan is a gas chamber and people are dying. Everyone is noticing this, not just those who are sick. Even the politicians like the PDL town councillor, Barbara Ciabò, whose son has been afflicted with leukaemia. Everyone except Mortizia Moratti who on the FOURTEENTH consecutive day of out-of-control-smog has given a sweet response to pass on to the parents of the Milan children who are suffering from leukaemia: “The air in Milan is not worse than it was last year.” A response worthy of Marie Antoinette when she suggested giving cake to the starving because there was no bread. In December Ms Moratti received a notification of proceedings. She is under investigation for the pollution of Milan. A research study, that was requested by the city, that revealed the intolerable and criminal levels of pollution is still "kept hidden” by the city. What is needed is a “class action” against the city of Milan (to be repeated in all the cities that are polluted). Enrico Fedrighini, town councillor for the Green Party, has been occupying the Milan Council Chamber for some days. The blog interviewed him.

Interview with Enrico Fedrighini

“My name is Enrico Fedrighini and I am a Milan town councillor and I am the leader of the Green Party in Palazzo Marino. Since yesterday [25/1/2010, editor] I have been occupying the Council Chamber of the city of Milan to push the administration into taking the initiative with concrete, urgent and immediate steps for the smog, which has its origin, above all in the traffic of private vehicles.
In 2006, the city of Milan started to tackle the problem, recognising the existence of the problem, unlike the two previous Albertini-led administrations that denied there was a problem. The current mayor did an election campaign promising to tackle the problem of smog and started off with a measure that we valued for its courage, in a city that has never wanted to do anything against the “Party of the automobile” and also for the innovative level of this measure, one of the few that exist in the world. It’s an urban toll called "road pricing" within the centre of the city, a bit like they have done in London within the “inner ring-road”, having a toll payment for private vehicles and commercial vehicles that varies according to the pollution capacity of the vehicle, based on data provided by the European Union. The measure that came into force on 2 January 2008 has interrupted a dynamic that continued for the previous 20 years in which private traffic continued to grow, while the use of public transport went down. These two factors suddenly switched, not in a revolutionary way, but for the first time the users of public transport has grown by 22,000 passengers a day and the number of cars in circulation has gone down, not just within the tariff zone, but inside the whole city.
Halfway across the ford, the politicians, the special interests of the lobbies, above all of the commercial sector, and the fear of not getting votes in the “Party of the car drivers” started to get them to move into reverse gear. A more serious element, because the citizen is also willing to make sacrifices and accept unpopular political choices, but only if they aren’t done Italian-style, if they are done seriously and where the existence of a strategy is well in evidence, and there’s the objective of protecting health.
Clearly the “pass” on its own has little weight: in Milan we can even double the number of surface-based public transport vehicles, and that is the fastest and most immediate solution, but if we continue to travel in a queue behind the cars, we are just increasing the congestion. A proportion of the space in the urban area has to be reserved for the movement of surface-based public transport: that means space for cycle tracks, and that means moving around on bicycles that in Milan is one of the most important alternatives. The length of the average daily journey in Milan is 3.5 Km. That goes down to 1.5 Km inside the inner ring-road. Basically it is a flat city, to take away space from private vehicles to give it to pedestrians, cyclists and public transport vehicles. All this was part of a strategy that was started and then suddenly interrupted: the cabinet member Croci was sent away, sacrificed to the interests of the lobbies of the commercial sector, for whom the car has to go everywhere and must have space available everywhere. Every year there is voting and thus the election becomes the element around which choices are constructed. Today the “Ecopass” is paid by only 15% of the vehicles that enter the city: it’s practically like not having it.
The results of research studies commissioned by the Administration show that , if the “Ecopass” were to be extended to all the classes of vehicles that have access inside the inner ring-road, we would have a reduction of more than 35% of the traffic in the centre and more than 15% in the rest of the city. Today, one of the results obtained by the lobby of the commercial sector is for a certain type of vehicle to not pay. It’s the diesel Euro 4 without filter and though there are only a few thousand of these vehicles they are responsible for almost 30% of the polluting emissions. And an anti-particulate diesel Euro 4 without filter, pollutes much more than a Euro0 running on petrol, going on the basis of a research study whose results have been anonymously passed to us by the Administration.

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