Practices of traffic calming
by Luca Rubino

Managing mobility in town areas and attempting to resolve its collateral negative problems (traffic, pollution), are catalytic themes of western politics. We must deal with the continous increase of the world's need of mobility to avoid its transforming itself in traffic everywhere, it's in fact difficult not to consider the number and quality of future transfers, especially in today's rising nations. It will be unlikely that the increasing oil price, due to the shortage of this product and due to the surplus of demand over offer, will be the "natural" solution to this problem (though I personally believe that we are also going in this direction). For those town areas with an high mobility, new models of traffic calming and controlling are necessary ; these are also useful to guide those nations that today are facing a constant increase in the use of polluting means of transport.
There are four aims which have been supposed necessary to achieve a reduction of traffic in the town areas:
· the cutback of private vehicles
· the rationalisation of transfers and of parking
· the differentiation of the different types of private and public means of transport
· the regaining of the common space.
According to the logic of a new model of behaviour in managing the mobility, the single citizen should be able to choose different ways to move, according to the increase of the distance he must cover: on foot for short distance, by bicycle, by new means of public transport ( on call, etc.), by traditional means of public transport, by shared private means of transport (car sharing, car pooling, etc.), and, only at last, private car.
To achieve such results it is clearly necessary that, all the different ways of traffic controlling and calming, which today are tested, work all together.

The criterion which has been used to define the web site survey has been that of preferring those sites which let us know and share information about instruments and practices, sites where the reader can find and download documents, manuals, toolkits, accounts, etc... The survey is divided in five categories:
· European institutions
· European projects
· lobbies/associations
· events
· other sites of interests (initiatives and research)
The category European projects is the main category of this review, inside we put together those sites that give information about some of the most significant experiences of traffic calming done in Europe in the last years.

Managing mobility brings to an approach involving a variety of fields: you must consider socio-cultural, economical, political and the environmental aspects of the problem ( this will help us justify unpopular, but necessary, choices to reduce traffic): "In many quarters it is now believed that the time has come to break the isolation of the problem and its solutions, not only through the integration of instruments and decisions, but also by addressing the problems and devising solutions within the framework of a territorial strategy that will take into due account the different 'landscapes' involved. The need to come to grips with the complex nature of the theme is a stimulus to engage in research along new lines".
This review was realised after the article published on Urbanistica n.126 titled "Roads and practices: a research on Milan", from which the sentence above is taken.(Download full English version of the article).