The number of heavy vehicles that speed along almost the entire A4 Milan-Venice every day is double compared to that which runs on the Turin-Milan route; while the Brescia-Padua continues to be the busiest motorway section in Italy, even by articulated lorries. This was communicated by the CGIA of Mestre, reprocessing Aiscat data for 2023. For the Mestre research office, the indicator, although partial, confirms what economic statistics have been telling us for some time; Milan continues to be the economic and financial capital of the country, but the main production triangle now has Bologna and Venice as its summits.
The result that emerges from the processing developed by the CGIA research office on data from the Italian Association of Motorway and Tunnel Concessionaires (AISCAT) is unequivocal: if 28,618 vehicles passed along the A4 Brescia-Padua motorway in the first half of 2023 average heavy loads per day, on the Milan-Brescia there are 25,920, while on the Turin-Milan “only” 13,636: practically half of the two figures just mentioned. The number of such vehicles is ideally calculated, defined by the ratio of vehicle-kilometers and the length of the highway.
As regards the other Venetian motorways, what stands out in this count are the 19,568 theoretical average daily trucks that “ply” the so-called Passante/Tangenziale di Mestre (A4-A57), the 13,789 of the A22 Verona-Brennero, the 11,914 of the A13 Bologna -Padua, the 11,300 of the A4 Venice-Trieste, the 4,686 of the A27 Venice-Belluno, the 4,598 of the A31 Valdastico and the 2,803 of the SPV Pedemontana Veneta.
Compared to pre-Covid, notes the CGIA of Mestre, only the A13 Bologna-Padua has suffered a negative contraction in the traffic flows of articulated vehicles (-1.1 percent). In all the other motorways in Veneto, however, the change was anticipated by the plus sign, with peaks of 21.3 percent along the Valdastico and 20.9 percent on the Passante/Tangenziale di Mestre. On the entire motorway network in Italy, the average daily figure is 9,838 theoretical vehicles, a flow three times lower than the average figure of the busiest route in Italy, i.e. the A4 Brescia-Padua and half of that which runs along the passerby of Mestre.
Obviously the data, which indicates an important flow of traffic, also has the downside: with so many trucks on the road, many Venetian road infrastructures are “choked” by traffic, pollution and present a very high risk threshold for road accidents. While the strong territorial imbalance that emerged from this comparison, the CGIA of Mestre recognizes, could be partly “conditioned” by the fact that the North-West has a more widespread railway network than each of the other geographical divisions of the country. The choice to travel by road, in the Northeast, can also be conditioned by the insufficiency of various infrastructures.
