A city not suitable for cars:the battle of the cycling activists of Milan

Of Elena Colli, Matteo Spini, Jacopo Targa*

“We die in Milan”, read the banners of one of the many demonstrations that have taken place in the city in recent months.Unfortunately, 2024 also opened with tragic news:Ivano Calzighetti, 37 years old, was hit and killed by a person driving a car while he was returning home by bicycle. According to open data on the victims of road accidents in Milan, in 2023 29 people lost their lives on the streets of the Milanese municipality.If you look at the number of collisions involving bicycles in the city, you notice that in 2022 the highest number of all the large Italian municipalities was recorded in Milan.

For this reason, Milanese cycling activism has attracted a lot of attention in recent times:the numerous actions implemented to request greater safety on the streets of Milan - garrisons, human cycle paths, traffic blocks, "illegal cycle paths" - have attracted the attention of the media national and sometimes as well international.

And to say that in the common imagination, the bicycle is linked to relaxing and carefree sensations.Perhaps too much so, as demonstrated by the obstinate infantilisation of this means of transport in the Italian context, often relegated to an object of leisure and play and hardly conceived as a real means of transport.The bicycle, in reality, is one of the most efficient means of moving in dense urban contexts, due to the optimal ratio between distance traveled and energy consumption:as the Austrian philosopher wrote Ivan Illich, "the bicycle has elevated human mobility to a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically impossible."Yet the reality of the city is far from all these sensations, as one often finds oneself having to move in a context in which the car dominates unchallenged, oppressing the feeling of freedom that the bicycle embodies.All this does not happen by chance, but is to be found in the dominant role that car travel has in this context.

Milan, a car-friendly city

In the city of Milan alone, the space occupied by parked cars is equal to nine times the Sempione Park.This is public space – often occupied for free, as evidenced by the 100,000 cars parked illegally in the city – from which the original task of being a lively place of sociality and aggregation is taken away.For comparison, the acclaimed "wild parking" of scooters, decidedly less bulky vehicles, is equal to 1.700 vehicles.

Where we could have wider pavements, cycle paths or green spaces, we therefore find dead space, ugly and made unproductive by vehicles which 92% of the time remain parked and unused themselves.Contrary to common sense, the problem is not the fact that there are few parking spaces, but the fact that there are too many cars in circulation:as it indeed demonstrates an analysis conducted by “Sai che Gioca?”, Milan, with 22 parking spaces per 100 inhabitants, has more than three times as many parking spaces as in Barcelona and Paris, which have 7 and 6 per 100 people respectively.

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The real problem is that the negative effects that the car system generates are not limited only to those who mainly use the car to get around, but also extend to people who choose to move in other ways.The urban environment and the streets are mainly designed with private motorized mobility in mind, preventing public transport from being truly efficient and widespread and active mobility from being attractive, since the principle of traffic management has as its priority objective to ensure flow faster than cars.And this is how the presence of traffic lights, architectural barriers (such as guard rails), sidewalks used as parking lots and multi-lane roads are considered "normal" elements on city streets.And it is precisely this normalization that also inhibits the possibility of imagining them differently ("we don't lack space, we lack imagination”, we wrote in an article on Blue suitcase) and makes the risks that this type of mobility entails acceptable in the mind of the driver:a state of affairs that psychologist Ian Walker defines as motonormativity.It, for example, leads to considering as customary, rather than as a serious infringement, the fact that speed limits are rarely respected, as well as the idea that cycling and pedestrian mobility should be marginalized and segregated in residual spaces of the road.

Cities and cycle paths:We don't lack space, but imagination

Autocentrism is not a natural condition but the product of precise political choices that have given priority to motorized traffic, in a mutual incentive with the automotive industry, to the detriment of public transport and cycling.As he remembers Gino Cervi, continuing the story Phosphorus by Primo Levi, in the first half of the 20th century it was normal for the working class to use the bicycle in many Italian cities, including Milan.Since the post-war period, however, the triumph of motorization, favored by the political class, has almost completely expelled bicycles from the urban landscape.Just look at the distribution of resources:despite the increase in local administrations' sensitivity towards active mobility in recent years, public investments continue to enormously favor the car.According to the Clean Cities report “It's not a country for bikes”, between 2020 and 2030 Italian governments budgeted 98.6 billion euros for cars versus 1.2 billion euros for bicycles.The last three centre-left councils in Milan have shown themselves inclined to create cycle paths and traffic calming interventions but with modest ambitions, perhaps so as not to disappoint traders and motorists too much, already on a war footing for low emission zones (Area B and Area C).

But it is not "just" about reducing spaces for socializing, playing and marginalizing other modes of travel.As is known, car traffic contributes to the high levels of pollution in the Po Valley (just to give an example, second a 2021 study Milan was the fifth European city in terms of mortality due to nitrogen dioxide, a polluting gas produced mainly by diesel engines.See also lo study by Cittadini per l'Aria Onlus), climate change, city warming, but also noise pollution (a decidedly underestimated public health problem) as well as the numerous violent deaths on the road:road accidents are there leading cause of death in young people aged between 15 and 29.

In Milan, the significant growth in road accidents on two wheels has its origins in 2020, the year in which the lowest number of the last 10 years was recorded (813), and from which continuous growth began (1,467 in 2022), in a combination of factors triggered by the pandemic .

In fact, it was in that period that Milan, "the city that doesn't stop", was forcibly stopped by the COVID-19 pandemic and the dramatic impact on human lives that this socio-health crisis entailed.Unintentionally, this produced the opportunity for critical reflection regarding mobility.In fact, as in other cities in the world, in the period 2020-2022 more and more people have chosen the bicycle as a suitable means of ensuring good physical distancing while keeping their lungs and body trained, in the widespread rediscovery of the importance of doing physical activity.The bike bonus and the promise of dozens of kilometers of cycle paths have also contributed to the cycling boom.It's a shame that today we see very few results from the ambitious Milanese plan to limit car use in phase 2 ("Open Roads"), enthusiastically taken up by various newspapers and even by Greta Thunberg.

”Milan is to introduce one of Europe's most ambitious schemes reallocating street space from cars to cycling and walking, in response to the coronavirus crisis.” https://t.co/crSIMT5G5G

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) April 21, 2020

Of the "strong improvement of the cycle network" announced in the plan, what remains today above all are the few tens of km of emergency itineraries traced only with signs and systematically not respected (e.g.Viale Monza), or, finally, the safety of some sections which began after three years with the coloring of the asphalt red and the concrete curbs (e.g.Corso Buenos Aires) – requests made for some time by the cycling community.

The Città30 approach mentioned in the Plan also remains essentially on paper:since the agenda approved on 9 January 2023 on "Milano Città 30" there has been no further news of its actual technical-political developments and advancements.The result is that the securing of spaces for active mobility has not been able to keep up with the actual boom in bicycles in the city, with the consequent increase in accidents and deaths on the road.

The city at 30 kilometers per hour is a question of democracy of public space

In addition, the increase in construction sites in the city, probably also fueled by the 110% bonus on renovations approved by the Conte II government, has resulted in a large number of heavy vehicles in circulation.The numbers on road deaths in the last year speak for themselves:there were nine people hit and killed by people driving heavy vehicles in 2023 (source: open data on victims of road accidents in Milan).A bulletin of death that fueled a feeling of fear towards the use of the bicycle at the very moment in which more and more people in the city were approaching this means of transport, highlighting the cracks of a "half-finished revolution".

The response of cycling activism

But there are those who say no:those who refuse to consider the succession of news articles on road deaths "normal" or "inevitable".There are those who stop to remember every single victim, replacing numbers with names, and who contrast motor-normativity with a collective work aimed at imagining a different city, tailored to people.

If, on the one hand, the Municipality of Milan has shown little ambition in dealing with this situation in practice, on the other hand, various responses and reflections have arrived from citizens and associations who demand a safe use of urban space.The increase in the use of bicycles and the risks associated with their use has consolidated a cycling community which is made up of different subjectivities and approaches (those who are part of structured associations and organisations, those historically involved in local activism, but also those who are recently got into the saddle), which nevertheless appears cohesive in the diversity that characterizes it, and which perhaps draws its strength precisely from a plurality of actors who come from different contexts but converge towards the same goal.

Networking:the union (of approaches and skills) is strength

The wave of mobilizations of 2022-2023 is due to a renewed community of actors, in some cases historically rooted in Milanese cycling activism and in other cases more recently arrived and not always closely linked to it.

On the one hand, in fact, there is the experience and the network built by people who have been part of the Milanese cycle activism environment for a long time, who often have as a common denominator the Critical Mass town.As narrated in book curated by Chris Carlsson – one of the historic participants of the critical mass of San Francisco – Italian cycling activism was born in Milan in February 2002:while the Sanremo festival was being broadcast on TV, a group of cyclists gave life to a festive collective ride, claiming a different city, a more romantic and cheerful city, opposite to the one which sees people isolated and closed inside a car and stuck in constant traffic.That February evening caused the first fracture of the autocentric model, as well as becoming an event that is repeated every Thursday evening starting from Piazza Mercanti.

Various realities were born from the Milanese critical mass and went on to constitute the second wave of cycling activism in 2011-2012, which corresponds to the birth of Salvaiciclisti in Italy and which in these years saw the celebration, in many cases, of ten years of activity:Upcycle, Bici e Radici, Massa Marmocchi – who join the more institutional and historical activism of entities such as FIAB Ciclobby.

Among these people is Davide Branca, also nicknamed Zeo.Anyone who frequents the Milanese cycling scene cannot fail to know Zeo, as he is often seen at demonstrations and initiatives with his cargo bike. ShareRadio – a web radio of which he is a member, founded in 2009 in Baggio, a western suburb of Milan, which aims to promote social cohesion in the city.Or even Angelo Lisco, who assigns himself the role of "arruffapopolo":since he came across Critical Mass by chance he has never given up on the cause, and today he tries to make it a full-fledged profession, managing the reality of Hidden Cycling Workshop inside Sempione Park.Together with other names such as Marco Mazzei, now a city councilor in Milan, they told us how Critical Mass acted as an incubator for the creation of a series of realities which then continued their path independently and with different approaches:some becoming an association, some militating in a more political way, some transforming themselves from cycle workshops into real shops.

Then there are more recent realities that have brought new elements, with new approaches and skills especially in the communication field:it is certainly among the most cited Do You Know What You Can?, the main campaign of the Colibrì Committee for the diffusion of the culture of active participation and political mobilization, and "We can't wait", committee for the cycle path on the Ghisolfa Bridge.But also Ilaria Fiorillo, who with her Instagram page Milanoinbicicletta shows the beauty of cycling in the city and the need to be able to do it safely.In these cases, the wise use of social communication and in general the help of communication professionals for campaigns, press releases, posters, critical response to ineffective advertising, effective graphics and languages.As Mazzei states, "they brought professionalism into a very amateur and fragmented world, also in terms of man-hours".

The union of these different types of forces, skills and experiences have generated a new ferment in Milanese cycling activism, to the point that a coalition made up of Cittadini per l'Aria Onlus, Sai che visto?, FIAB Milano Ciclobby Onlus, Genitori Antismog ETS and supported by more than 200 associations, it gave life to the campaign "City of people” which was created a bit like the platform for all the cycle activism mobilizations of 2022-2023.Despite the diversity of actors and actions that make up Milanese cycling activism, what emerges is a consistency of the main demands:

• Approve the “Milan city at 30km/h” route, through the redistribution of public space in favor of those who travel on foot, by public transport or by bicycle.
• Create an entire cycling city, for all ages and abilities, adopting the '10 priorities for biciplan di Milano' by Clean Cities
• Make the spaces in front of every school in the city a 'school street'
• Implement a program to eliminate all currently tolerated illegal parking
• Give priority to public transport, increasing preferential lanes and introducing the green wave at traffic light intersections.
• Restore walking Sundays immediately.
• Impose movement sensors on heavy vehicles, a request that was made starting from the tragic road collision where Veronica D'Incà lost her life on 1 February 2023

These demands are part of the broader slogan of putting people at the center of urban planning.Indeed, as it also demonstrates a video by Mark Wagenbuur – a famous Dutch blogger who documents the cycling culture of the Netherlands – different categories of people benefit when measures are introduced to reduce self-centrism, such as people with disabilities and children.And it is also from this perspective that we can read the actions carried out by the Milanese cycling community, which has long expanded the discussion from the dimension of the "bike" to the more general one of "public space" and people.

Imagine a city without cars

As admitted by many of the people interviewed, the effort to network, also combining different approaches, was fundamental to defining and carrying forward this battle, with the aim of sharing knowledge and practices of mutual help between the various associations and realities.

Act:How to get people city?

Alongside more institutional forms of pressure, what is surprising about Milanese cycling activism is the frequency of protest actions carried out between April 2022 and December 2023:28, more than one a month, not counting critical mass.

What gave impetus to this third wave of Milanese cycling activism was the protest on the Ghisolfa Bridge on 28 April 2022, organized by the city committee "We can't wait" and then repeated four times until October 2023.The Ghisolfa bridge - Bacula overpass is a very important infrastructure, very busy and without cycle paths.Second monitoring hosted by "Nondiamo l'ora", every day at least 1,600 cyclists cross it, riding on the sidewalks or risking their lives in traffic.The 2017-18 participatory budget envisaged the creation of a cycle path, which was then included in the 2019-21 Three-Year Public Works Plan but never built.Starting from the betrayed promise of the municipal administration, a mobilization was born which combined road blocks, lobbying and the creation of "illegal" cycle paths on the bridge itself, promptly canceled by the Municipality.The construction of the official track is scheduled for 2025, a time deemed unacceptable by the cycling community which in fact continues to mobilize.

Ghisolfa's highly symbolic mobilization triggered a series of other sequences of protests, among which "ProteggiMi" must certainly be mentioned, a sort of "human cycle path".The idea, imported from Portland and discussed through a public meeting in the meeting place of the Critical Mass Milanese, it was organized for the first time on 10 November 2022 following the frustration over the failure to respect the new Viale Monza cycle path and was repeated 4 times, given its wide participation.This mobilization had a notable media impact and managed to draw attention to the causes of the insecurity of the Corso Venezia-Corso Buenos Aires-Viale Monza cycle lane, one of the most used in the city and continually occupied by parked vehicles.The protest was replicated in other Italian cities and its echo also reached beyond the Alps.

When a 14-year old boy died after getting hit by a tram, these #Milanese citizens took matters in their own hands.If the city doesn't protect us, we protect ourselves. #HumanScale (go @M_WrenchGang)pic.twitter.com/S3K1GprfcZ

— Cycling Professor 🚲  (@fietsprofessor) November 11, 2022

The events of the Ghisolfa Bridge and ProteggiMi illustrate very well the great emotional work carried out by the leaders of cycling activism.The 2022-2023 mobilizations show characteristics of strong tactical innovation, communicative professionalism and radicalism, factors that have led to great attention (we'll come back), but also to the double ability to create empathy with those who move on foot and by bike and to stimulate indignation towards the municipal administration, starting from disappointment and frustration regarding betrayed promises.

Yet despite the mobilizations of 2022, it cannot be said that the city's streets are still safe for those who travel them by bike, scooter or on foot.On February 1, 2023 Veronica Francesca D'Incà tragically died when she was hit by a person driving a truck.Three days later the anger of the Milanese cycling movement exploded and thousands of people demonstrated in Piazzale Loreto, returning an image that recalls the famous "Stop kindermoord” Dutch, starting the cry “No more deaths in the streets”.

Following this demonstration, the very busy Piazzale Loreto hub has increasingly become the symbol of the car-centric city to be reimagined.Following the death of Alfina D'Amato, in June 2023, yet another woman hit on her bicycle by a person driving a heavy vehicle, another initiative was organized to block traffic in the square:this time it was a flash event organized within two days via word of mouth in private messaging chats.

The new sequence of protests with the slogan "Enough deaths in the streets", with similar demonstrations and actions as a response to every death in the street has therefore taken the form of ritual, that is, repetitive, standardized, symbolic social actions with a highly emotional content that are have been used to counter the normalization of such tragedies and channel indignation and anger towards institutions considered non-compliant.We could label “Enough deaths in the streets” as commemorations, to highlight the combination between commemoration of the dead and political action.

The use of roadblocks on various occasions as a way of protest, but also of the "illegal" cycle path designed on the Ghisolfa bridge 4 times between July 2021 and November 2023, demonstrate the radicalism and anger of part of the cycle-activist movement, a "radical flank" also willing to violate the law and defy the ire of motorists and administrators in order to change a status quo considered intolerable, which emerged most clearly following the deaths on the road.Although such forms of civil disobedience have recently achieved popularity thanks to the actions of climate movements (e.g.Last Generation), it is important to underline the fact that it was already a practice of the critical mass and cycling movements, used precisely to overturn the relationship between bicycles and cars.

The first cracks in the autocentric city

After two years of fighting for "a city of people" there are the first results:the issue of safety for cyclists and pedestrians has attracted considerable media attention and has entered the city's political agenda.Among the most important measures are the approval of the agenda for a 30 km/h city by the City Council, the reduction of the discounts dedicated to the Milan-Monza Motor Show (from the 80 cars exhibited in Piazza Duomo in 2022 at 10 am 2023) and the resolution that introduces the obligation of blind spot sensors for heavy vehicles.Unfortunately the latter was recently rejected by the TAR following an appeal by Assotir (Association of road haulage companies), but it is being appealed by the Municipality of Milan as well as being discussed at national level with a legislative proposal.In general it should be considered that the events that affect a city like Milan, and the resulting media attention, have the power to act as a sounding board at a national level.Which actually happened, for example, with the reopening of the debate on Città30 on the Italian political agenda:this can also be considered a great achievement.

Also recent news is the establishment of a team of local police officers dedicated to monitoring compliance with the cycle paths of Corso Buenos Aires and Viale Monza, which have long been requested by cycle activism.However, if seen in detail, these measures denote a character that is still too intangible:the January agenda on City 30 was never transformed into something more concrete, as was instead done in Bologna with the resolution of 1 July which sanctioned the implementation of City 30, of which we can already see now i first construction sites;even in the case of dedicated sensors and patrols these are "palliative" measures designed within the motorist realism which does not dispute the dominant role that is still occupied by cars in Milan.

And now?

If some of the requests made by the cycling community have had broad support from the municipal council (specifically, the "City 30" agenda and the obligation of sensors), the same cannot be said of the council, which has often shown absent and without a clear stance regarding the serious events in the city.

The process was therefore blocked in the hands of those who hold executive power, with mayor Beppe Sala himself often accused by the cycling community of being top-down and lacking in dialogue, in a constant balance between moderately environmentalist policies and the desire not to create too many conflicts with traders, motorists and the car lobby, which remains very strong and present in the Milanese capital.

On the other hand, the City Council's invitation to the Council to create the Città30 has not produced any particular decisions to date.Compared to the Ghisolfa bridge, in the short term it is planned to implement bollards and protective signs to protect those traveling by bike, but the construction of a real track has been postponed to 2025.More generally, the impression is that there is a lack of medium and long-term planning, the ability to involve citizens with targeted communication and participation operations, and above all the ambition of cities like Paris, London, Brussels and Strasbourg which in very few years have revolutionized the way their inhabitants travel.

If from an executive point of view a more courageous push is needed, on the activism side the volume of protests does not yet have the numbers of the large demonstrations that have moved Amsterdam or London.The Milanese civic struggle involved a plurality of actors who, as seen, adopted tactics and methods from various traditions of political action in a complementary and flexible manner, with an effective result.

However, there is still much to do:a theme that also emerged from the people interviewed was the need to expand the community and unite the struggles.For example, the greater involvement of climate movements such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and Ultima Generazione or of female riders could be a key factor in opening new cracks in the idea that cars are essential in the city and helping to build a new idea of ​​urban living more in harmony with the environment.Or again, the transfeminist movements against gender violence such as Non Una Di Meno, which can find in the bicycle one of the many tools and symbols of struggle and liberation for a safer and more inclusive city for all.

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This does not necessarily mean getting rid of cars completely, but reducing their role and the way in which they occupy space, according to the principle that "the bigger and heavier the vehicle you drive, the greater the risk of doing harm and therefore responsibility towards other people", as highlighted by some reflections that emerged from the "Enough deaths in the streets" rally organized to remember Ivano Calzighetti.It is precisely from these first cracks that the collapse of the autocentric city can take place.But it will be a positive collapse, which will create space for the reconstruction of a different city, where people, and not cars, will finally return to being at the center of urban life.

*Thanks for the chats and time dedicated to:Angelo Lisco, Ilaria Fiorillo, Davide Branca, Tommaso Goisis, Ilaria Lenzi, Marco Mazzei

Preview image:The demonstration following the death of Veronica Francesca D'Incà.Photo credits:Andrea Cerchi