Product of Prosperity : Rome Copes With Eternal Woe: Traffic

Like the Caesars before them, Rome’s city fathers have concluded that the Eternal City is too often also infernal, and they are warring anew on an incessant problem, traffic jams.

Nobody is predicting victory.

“Traffic is the first, the most prolonged and the most important issue we discuss,” said City Councilor Luigi Celeste Angrisani, who is Rome’s public safety director.

“One fine day, it will just stop altogether, everything, all of it,” growled taxi driver Claudio De Falco, wishing aloud he had stayed home in Sicily.

Julius Caesar sought peace 2,000 years ago by banning vehicular traffic from Rome during the day. Less imperial remedies are in the offing in these more complex modern times, but their sum could eventually change the face of Rome as it is seen by residents and tourists alike.

No Dictatorship Now

“Caesar was a dictator,” Police Chief Francesco Russo said. “If I tried to close the historic city center to traffic entirely, as many would like, I’d get a call from the Pope asking to be let through. Then the president of Italy would call to say he couldn’t get to work. Then the president of the Senate. Then. . . .”

If Rome’s traffic mess is not new, it is at least of newly historic proportions. Traffic is, in fact, the untrammeled and, many would say, savage, celebration of an unprecedented wave of prosperity that Italy has enjoyed since World War II. Rome’s snarl is echoed today in every Italian city and most of the cities in Western Europe.

In 1950, by Russo’s count, there were some 50,000 motor vehicles in Rome. Today there are 1.6 million. That is 400,000 more vehicles than there were Romans in 1939. When World War II began, the population was about the same as in imperial times, and farmers harvested in sight of the old city gates.

Better for Chariot Days

Of particular issue in Rome now is the splendid but vulnerable five square miles or so that make up the city center, which corresponds roughly to the ancient Romans’ walled metropolis. This centro storico is a victim of both history and a choking centralization better suited to chariot days.

“This is a city built for another time,” City Councilor Angrisani said. “What have the Caesars got to do with Ferraris?”

Bad enough that the old city is an international magnet for as many as a million tourists a day, or that some of its streets are no wider than when Caesar decreed that highways should be 4.8 meters wide (about 16 feet) and byways 2.9 meters.

But along these historic thoroughfares today lie uncountable marble monuments, the palaces of the president, the Parliament, government ministries, the country’s most important banks, dozens of embassies, corporate offices, major newspapers and Rome’s best shops, restaurants and hotels.

The police estimate that more than 2 million of Rome’s 3 million people find themselves in the historic center for one reason or another during a business day.

Driver and walker alike move at a snail’s pace. No one can say for sure how long a particular journey will take. Passengers in Rome’s taxis, where hungry meters start at $2, often share the driver’s longing for more bucolic climes.

Pedestrians at Peril

Once, downtown Rome ranked among the world’s most enjoyable promenades. Today it is too often a pedestrian test by fire--noisy, noxious and dangerous. Cars and motorbikes crowd the sidewalks (where there are sidewalks), forcing walkers into narrow, cobblestoned streets. Safer to have been a Christian in Nero’s Rome than to walk with your back to traffic along a picturesque alleyway today. The deaf have no chance.

It is on the back streets of Rome that the Italian genius for building sawed-off cars that look like fugitives from cereal boxes is at its most frightful. One such contraption, called a Panda, is merely a nuisance when encountered with its sewing-machine engine on a highway. In Rome’s byways, though, Pandas pounce like grizzlies.

Across the Tiber from the old city is Vatican City. The Vatican and environs are known to the police as the 17th Precinct. Only 111,000 people live there, but the daily transit of people is 1.5 million, according to Maj. Franco Egizi, who keeps track of such things for Rome’s 4,000-member municipal police force.

Car Sales Booming

“The city has exploded in the last 30 years, and we clearly don’t have the structures to deal with it,” said Massimo Palumbi, the city councilor who oversees traffic control. “In the last two years there has been a terrific boom in car sales. Surveys show that despite high taxes, high gasoline costs ($4 a gallon) and high fines for infractions, people, particularly those in the lower income brackets, will bear any sacrifice before they will sacrifice their car.”

In the middle of a debate between purists who want cars out of the historic center altogether and pragmatists who simply want them better controlled, Rome is fighting back.

By writ of a ruling center-left coalition in the Rome City Council, traffic patterns are being altered and no-traffic zones expanded. All traffic is now banned from the central portion of the historic center between 7 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. on weekdays. Special lanes are reserved for buses and taxis.

There are, to be sure, many breeches in the wall thrown up around the restricted area by traffic police.

“People will tell any lie to get in,” a motorcycle cop said. “Most often, their mother is dying.”

More Buses, Better Trains

Stiffer enforcement is in prospect, Angrisani said. And with it, according to Palumbi, will come a redesigned traffic flow, 400 more buses, better commuter trains, expansion of the subway system, construction of 15 new underground parking garages and a rail line to link Rome with its international airport.

Most tellingly for visitors, traffic-free pedestrian zones are growing steadily. This month the area around the Pantheon became a pedestrian island, joining such other traffic-free attractions as the Piazza del Popolo, Piazza Navona, Piazza di Spagna and Santa Maria in Trastevere.

A newly planted green space has replaced the chaotic old parking lot in the Piazza Venezia at the very heart of the city. In coming months, Palumbi said, traffic will be banned around such other monuments as Santa Maria Maggiore, the Renaissance-era Via Giulia and the equally historic Via dei Coronari.

Tourist Buses at Issue

Still unresolved is the fate of the thousands of buses that bring tourists and pilgrims into the city every day from all over Europe. At present they go pretty much where they want to go.

Palumbi, a Christian Democrat, shares the view of commercial interests that they should not be unduly hindered. Angrisani, a Socialist, is of the school that holds that tourists unwilling to enjoy Rome afoot should stay home.

“Rome is a beautiful city, but nobody gets to see it,” said Massimo Scalia, a member of Parliament representing the Greens, a small environmentalist party. “We’ve long supported a ban on private cars in the center. Commercial interests complain about restrictions, but they are advantageous in the long run. We need better public transport and more stringent controls to discourage the use of private cars.”

As ever, there are trade-offs. Freeing the Pantheon of traffic has curtailed the route of the monument-hopping bus No. 119, a non-polluting, electric-powered minibus favored by tourists. Banning traffic from some areas forces it elsewhere. Arbitrarily restricting entry into the city, by an odd-even license plate scheme, for example, would overwhelm the creaking public transport system.

Romans have seen it all before. Caesar’s ban worked well by day, but as darkness fell on ancient Rome, so did the traffic.

“The crossing of wagons in the narrow, winding streets would snatch sleep from a sea-calf or the emperor Claudius himself,” the satirist Juvenal complained 1,900 years ago.

‘We Will Squeeze’

“It will be some time before the impact of the new measures is felt,” Councilor Palumbi said. “While the crisis continues, we will squeeze.”

A hated police fleet of 25 orange tow trucks bagged 3,227 victims in one 10-day period last month, about half of them in the historic center, according to police figures. In the same period, traffic police ticketed 28,388 cars for parking violations.

Chief Russo acknowledges that “as far as the people are concerned, we are the enemy.” Still, there is no shortage of Romans willing to police their peers. A call to expand by 800 the city force that deals with traffic--two other forces worry about crime--drew 44,000 applicants, mostly from women, Russo said.

Women officers, who make up less than 20% of the force, have a reputation of being harder to deceive than men. Although women receive the same starting pay as men of $750 a month, they are more expensive for the city to maintain: Rome’s lady cops are dressed, bonnets to boots, by Gucci.

In assaying the future of it all, it is important to note that Rome’s assault on traffic is being waged, appropriately, in the Italian style.

Exceptions for Chariots

Caesar’s traffic ban had exceptions, according to historian Jerome Carcopino--for chariots necessary for religious and civic ceremonies, for chariots engaged in public games and for the carts of contractors “engaged in wrecking a building to reconstruct it on better and hygienic lines.”

Caesar’s heirs have expanded this to no fewer than 40,000 exceptions. Permits have been issued to everyone from senators to bankers to journalists to--cynics insist--people with strategically placed second-cousins. The historic center’s 140,000 residents get permits easily, but so do many businessmen who say their office is their home.

And how would Claudius have dealt with color copying machines that can produce a close-enough permit in the blink of a plebian eye?

“We will cut the number of permits by a third next year,” Palumbi vowed.

Perhaps. Such assertions of vehicular order have been Rome’s will through the centuries, but it has never been Rome’s way.