Dec. 6, 2016
Limits on tourists, access gates and a toll booth at Pili
A stop to new tourist beds and a limit of 55,000 visitors per day (or rather the same as the number of residents in the city), to regulate via five access gates to the city, one for each method of transport. Professor Fabio Carrera – Veneziano by birth but American by adoption, with a chair at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute – yesterday presented to a commission at Ca’ Farsetti his plan for the management of the flow of tourism. The electronic engineer presented numbers: 55,000 residents in the city and an average of 67,000 visitors each day, that can, however, in the hotter months, surpass 100,000. He explained, “There are limits to social sustainability, because there are more tourists than residents in the city, by over 20%, and a limit to security.”
Carrera was inspired by the rules that govern the capacity of a soccer stadium, which have to have enough exits to allow an evacuation in eight minutes. Given that algorithm, calculated Carrera, the area between San Marco, campo San Bartolo, and San Salvador can hold a maximum of 29,000 people, 34,000 if extended to the whole city. “The limit of 55,000, he continued, is justifiable in terms of security and the possibility of evacuation.”
And so, a stop to adding more tourist beds and the change of use of city real estate, then an agency for Venice to manage five entry gates, a toll booth at Pili, a ticket to pay per person from buses and tour boats, while groups up to a maximum of twenty persons will have restricted access to vaporettos and will not be allowed to enter certain areas of the town center. The tourist data will be gathered and studied, accessed via Venice Connected (free for all). The money collected, one hundred million Euros, will be available to invest in housing, jobs and mobility.
-Source, Corriere del Veneto, Dec. 6, 2016
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