The Globe and Mail

The Italians are passionate about cars, which can come as a shock to first-time visitors. They expect to see quaint cobblestone streets full of fruit stalls, laughing children and grandmothers strolling arm-in-arm. Forget it. The streets are stuffed with cars and scooters. The rate of car ownership in Italy is the highest in Europe. Naples, Rome and Milan, in that order, share the dubious honour having the highest number of cars per citizen.
 
Milan, Italy's financial and fashion capital, has finally had enough of perennially clogged streets and the pollution and noise that come with them. On Monday, the city's Ecopass system came to life. Modelled on inner London's congestion fee, introduced in 2003 and considered a success, it requires motorists to pay to drive into the downtown core. The sliding fee ranges from the euros 10 a day for the most polluting cars (generally the old clunkers) to euros 2 for the cleaner ones. The fee applies from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Cameras at 43 entry points are used to enforce the Ecopass system. Offenders get whacked with a 70 euro fine.
 
Milan city officials declared Ecopass a stunning success from day one, with traffic said to have fallen by about 50 per cent in the Ecopass area. This seems exaggerated. It appears that many motorists are arriving before 7:30 a.m. to escape the charge. Furthermore, the newest, cleanest cars are exempt. The fee applies to fewer than half of the 90,000 cars that go in and out of Milan's centre every day.
 
Ecopass's biggest drawback is the size of the controlled zone. Milan mayor Letizia Moratti wanted a 60-square-kilometres blocked off. She settled for a mere 8.2 square kilometres after frierce opposition from the Northern League, the centre-right party on city council. That translates to a mere 4.5 per cent of Milan's geography.
 
Still, Ecopass is a good start. Eventually the controlled area will get bigger and two-thirds of the revenue raised, estimated at 24-million euros a year, is to be plowed back into public transportation (London, where the congestion charge raises almost 10 times that amount, does the same).
 
Traffic-limitation schemes are fairly common in Italy and other parts of Europe, especially in the smaller historic cities. This has given the Italians experience in learning to trick the cameras. A favourite technique is to drive in backwards, making it appear to the cameras that the car is leaving, not entering. How long before Milan's drivers do the same?