Four years of Milan’s road charge: effectiveness, acceptability and impacts

The city of Milan had introduced a form of cordon pricing to enter the city centre already in 2008. Originally, it was conceived as a pollution charge, aimed at reducing the polluting vehicles going into the most delicate area of the city, and only secondarily affecting the traffic volumes. That policy, whose effects declined over the years due to the fleet turnover, was substituted in 2012 with a genuine congestion charge, called ‘Area C’. The substitution came after a city referendum in June 2011. The chapter discusses the history of the policy and summarises the main outcomes, 5 years after implementation, in terms of traffic reduction, emissions and impact on user groups. A section is devoted to the description of the technology used and of the architecture of the system, entailing real time data exchange with the vehicle registry, the urban police and a number of payment systems. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the motivations behind the (unexpected) public and political acceptability of the policy and proposes some hints to transfer its experience to other cases.