Rome’s efforts to accommodate 1.5 million passengers

It is as if all the inhabitants of Genoa and Bologna are moving every day at the same time Rome. A mass landing in the morning turns into a mass exodus in the evening with the same biblical proportions. More than a million and a half people arrive, Monday through Friday, at Capital From Italian or other foreign cities, from neighboring provinces as well as from distant destinations: workers, students, few tourists, people who take buses and subways, throw waste into bins, make the traffic more chaotic and the lives of the fighters who have to adjust it. The influx of people who will attest to the centrality of Rome as a major European city – in terms of commercial and cultural supply – but at the same time end up weighing on the coffers of the municipal administration in the provision of services.

To answer the age-old question about how many people are really drawn to the capital, between residents and non-residents, and about the implications for the administrative apparatus, the Chamber of Commerce sent out metadata: It calculated accesses based on the number of mobile phone cards activated each day in the city. The report “La Grande Roma” found that “the total number of people present in Rome every day amounts to more than 4,640,000 people.” While the official population is as of 2019, 2,848,084.

Gualtieri . spree

The result of this study prompted Mayor Roberto Gualtieri to clench his fists at the Constitutional Affairs Committee last January and demand that the government achieve a better formula, precisely because of the “demographic weight that Rome already supports as the center of a vast region”. And between 170 million less in the tax detail, 200 million more that would have to arrive with the PNRR and nearly half a billion missing on the transportation front, the mayor had ticked: “If we combine the official population standard with a standard that — city users are called, Which people are actually in the city every day, this underestimation seems more significant, considering that more conservative estimates put the city’s user population at 524,000, but recent research by the Rome Chamber of Commerce measures the actual population, i.e. those who sleep in Rome at least 5 days a week at 3.3 million and city users 4.5 million.”
But the Chamber of Commerce did not stop there. He tried to look at these numbers in a qualitative way: he tried to understand who really “lives” in Rome, sleeps there but does not announce it, and what contribution he makes to the Eternal City. And the results are alarming, because in terms of the cost of services – as the Chamber of Commerce itself explained – “it is as if someone went to the supermarket for a family of two, and found four of them at home for dinner”.

The research authors split the flows into residents (people who sleep at least half the month in Rome), “passengers” (who attend for 15 days but do not live there), frequent users (no more than that) of 14 days) and visitors (one time per month) and tourists. Thus they discovered that as many as 900,000 people resided in Rome as necessary, bringing no benefits in economic or social terms. Equally disturbing, half of the tourists decided, in the name of “hit and run”, not to stay overnight.

Looking at the inner city roads, the center is still the preferred destination: there are about 160 thousand residents, but a million people move here in the morning and afternoon. While flows in the suburbs are still limited: Appio-Cinecittà, the most populous with more than 300 thousand inhabitants, sees corridors between 571 thousand and 724 thousand presences. It is no coincidence that the report states: “There are some municipalities that have a greater number of “core” residents compared to registered residents: these are municipalities 1 – Centro Storico, 2 – Parioli Nomentano, 9 – Our Laurentina and X Ostia Acelia. In the foreground, rather than tourists, the countries most eyeing Rome are Great Britain (27,269 daily users), China (23668 users), and the United States (20,831).