Bologna City 30 project wins 2024 European Road Safety Award

Brussels – The European Commission has awarded the Bologna City 30 project the 2024 Road Safety Awards: the mobility plan of the Emilia-Romagna capital won first place in the dedicated ‘Urban’ section of the European Road Safety Prize.

Along with the Municipality of Bologna, awards also went to an Austrian initiative to implement special road signs on curves to reduce risky maneuvers and motorcycle crashes, a Spanish project to create pedestrian and bicycle paths linking interurban areas in Galicia, and the development of an intelligent “traffic lights of the future” system in the German region of Bavaria.

Collecting the award at a ceremony held yesterday (Nov. 14) in Brussels was Bologna Municipality’s Councillor for New Mobility, Valentina Orioli. According to the European Commission, the first results of the Bologna project, which on more than 70 percent of urban roads has lowered the speed limit to 30 km/h, “are promising.” In the first three months of 2024, the city recorded a 14.5 percent reduction in accidents and a 12.6 percent decrease in injuries compared to the same year-earlier period.

The EU’s goal, endorsed by companies, associations, local authorities, research institutes, universities, and schools in the European Road Safety Charter, is to reduce accidents with fatalities and serious injuries by 50 percent by 2030 and reach zero by 2050. In Italy, 73 percent of road accidents occur on urban roads, and Bologna has the third highest road fatality rate.

In parallel to the encouraging decrease in accidents, Bologna’s new mobility has other merits as well: according to data released by Palazzo d’Accursio, in the first six months since the launch of City 30, the bicycle flow in the city has risen by 12 percent and the level of NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) recorded at one of the downtown’s entrances is reportedly the lowest in eight years, down 23 percent compared to the same periods in the previous two years.

It was a significant victory for the project that Mayor Matteo Lepore embraced, receiving criticism from the Transport Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. The League leader had sarcastically claimed that the 30 km/h limit could help “better hear the birds chirp” and would “force an entire city to come to a standstill,” risking to become “detrimental to everyone starting with those who work, with no proportional benefits in terms of safety and reduced emissions.” The Ministry of Transport had even joined in the appeal of two taxi drivers against the Bologna City 30 measures. The day before yesterday, the Emilia Romagna Regional Administrative Court declared the appeal inadmissible.