PISTOIA – A note from the Pistoia Ecologist and Progressiva council group relating to the adoption of the PUMS by the Council
“The mountain gave birth to the mouse: it took the Tomasi council seven years to adopt an incomplete, contradictory and lack of participation Urban Sustainable Mobility Plan.
The PUMS is an important document: it is here, in fact, that the administration must indicate an organic project for the development of cycle and pedestrian mobility, the improvement of the safety of motorists, cyclists and pedestrians, the resolution of the most critical road junctions, the redevelopment of urban areas, also with the provision of new services connected to sustainable mobility, to improve the quality of life of towns and citizens.
Pistoia has not had a PUMS since 2017 when, as soon as it was elected, the new right-wing majority decided to put in a drawer and not approve the Plan adopted in 2016 by the City Council.
Except to resurrect that plan if necessary. As in April this year, when the Tomasi council, in order to nominate the cycle path from Bonelle to the San Jacopo Hospital for a ministerial tender to obtain the necessary funding, had to rely on the 2013 Urban Planning Regulation and the 2016 Mobility Plan (both prepared by the Bertinelli administration) having not approved, in seven years, any of the essential tools for the urban planning of the territory.
But what are the main critical issues? of the path that led the council to adopt this PUMS?
It is a plan developed in fits and starts, without participation and without an overall idea of the direction in which to go from the council.
The cognitive framework is from September 2021, the plan report from April 2024. In between, citizen participation dried up with some online meetings (still in the middle of the pandemic!) at the end of 2021. In the following three years, nothing. The same traffic flow analyzes in some cases refer to 2015, in others, the most updated, to 2021. As if today’s city were also the same as the pandemic. Furthermore: where are the results of that online participation process? What proposals have emerged? Where are the minutes of those meetings? Why were they not published (as normally happens for participation in planning tools)?
After all these years, the council also proves inattentive in putting the pieces together, so much so that it has not noticed that in the adopted text, even interventions already completed (such as the double roundabout between Via Fermi and the ring road in Sant’Agostino) remained as PUMS proposals ) and whose results should instead be evaluated (such as the opening of the San Vitale gate).
Furthermore, the road works (sidewalks, crossings, lighting) envisaged by the Pinqua projects are considered in the “reference scenario”, i.e. among the interventions that the council considers certain even regardless of the PUMS. Projects which, however, unlike what was announced at the time by the council, were never financed, because they were too far behind in the ranking.
On the basis of what assumptions do you believe that these works will certainly be carried out?
Finally, there is a problem of timing. On the one hand it is clear, for example, that if the council had realized the importance of the PUMS earlier, instead of leaving it in a drawer for seven years, it would have been possible to think better about the route of the Ciclovia del Sole, making it an opportunity to redevelop and make safe the crossing and traffic in the towns of Pontenuovo and Santomato, instead of relegating the cycle path to the edge of the nurseries.
On the other hand, the inconsistency of the PUMS with the contemporary work on the new Structural Plan, which the city has been waiting for for years, clearly emerges.
Just look at the PUMS table in the quadrant between Pistoia and Montale, where the council inserts the new Montalese variant with a different route and sign from those identified in the conference for the Structural Plan with the Province and Region last December. Yet another sign of confusion around a work that should be radically revised and called into question, rather than making propaganda to pursue consensus in an instrumental way.
The PUMS must implement the guidelines of the Structural Plan and the Operational Plan for sustainable mobility. Instead, we risk the incredible confusion of having a PUMS that recalls the objectives of new plans not yet approved, still formally referring to the 2004 structural planning and the 2013 urban planning regulation. And sometimes not even to the latter, given the layout hypothesised on the PUMS for the extension of Via Salvo D’Acquisto which completely ignores a variant to the RU already approved.
For this reason too, we hope that citizens’ comments, to be presented by 8 July, and the involvement of the City Council can remedy some of these serious inconsistencies”.
Pistoia Ecologist and Progressive council group
