Defending public transport and the right to mobility while Italian and
foreign workers and their families are progressively expelled from urbancenters by rising prices and rents is a way to address the capital-labor
conflict in the home-work and home-school journey. -- Marco Veruggio
---- Built by fascism and inaugurated in 1932, the Rome-Viterbo railway,
known to Romans as "Rome North", winds for just over 100 kilometers from
the Piazzale Flaminio station, a few minutes from Parliament, covering
the urban section to the northern border of Rome in about 25 minutes and
the extra-urban section to the "City of Popes" in two and a half hours.
For tens of thousands of commuters and students who reach Rome every day
from working-class neighborhoods like Labaro and Prima Porta and from
the hinterland municipalities, the railway offers an alternative to the
traffic of the Flaminia, the consular road nestled between Cassia and
Salaria that connects the sliver of territory commonly called Rome North
with high schools, offices and shops in the center, for many adding to
the subway or bus ride once they reach the terminus. So much so that the
line is also one of the directions of the exodus of Romans that has been
underway for years and fueled both by the ever-increasing prices of the
real estate market and by the search for a more livable environment, far
from the chaos of cars and crowds of noisy tourists.
Until the pandemic, the railway moved 65,000 passengers a day, mostly
workers and students during rush hour, pensioners and immigrants during
the rest of the day. Just on the eve of the arrival of Covid, Nicola
Zingaretti, then president of the Lazio Region, owner of the railway,
which at the time was entrusted in concession to ATAC, together with the
Rome-Lido and the Rome-Giardinetti, announced a mega investment in the
"concession railways". Around 400 million euros to be divided between
Rome Lido and Rome North, of which over half destined for the purchase
of 18 new trains and for the modernization works of the Rome North: a
modern signaling system necessary to guarantee safety and the second
track for the extra-urban section, plus "straightening" works on the
line that will involve the closure of the Morlupo station, the one with
the greatest influx of commuters, and the construction of viaducts and
tunnels, as well as a new station in Flaminio directly connected to the
Metro A (subject of a previous investment). Works that, beyond the
necessary provision of signaling and safety systems to the standards of
the RFI network, appear more expensive than useful.
Furthermore, the arrival of the new trains (expected by 2022) and the
start of construction sites are subject to the usual practice of
postponements until no one knows when, only partly justified by the
outbreak of Covid. At one point, the regional transport councilor even
goes so far as to claim that the technicians of the companies
responsible for producing the new trains cannot reach Rome to carry out
the necessary inspections due to the lockdown.
So the original trains, with between 25 and 35 years of honorable
service behind them, are starting to fall apart, others are cannibalized
to obtain spare parts and are reduced first to about ten, then to half.
Therefore, the extra-urban service is largely entrusted to replacement
shuttles, while on the urban line dozens of trips are cancelled every
day, it happens that the trains stop in the open countryside forcing
passengers to reach the nearest station by walking on the tracks or, if
you are lucky, in the station and in this case you have to get off, wait
for another train to haul away the broken one and finally for the
arrival of a third to pick up the survivors and take them to their
destination. The delivery of the first new train is therefore postponed
to spring 2025, there is no certainty about the others. In the meantime,
since July 2022, management has passed to the companies Cotral (service)
and Astral (infrastructure) of the Lazio Region; the number of
passengers has decreased significantly; the introduction of new safety
standards has increased the travel times of the trains and it has
emerged that the guarantees opened by Firema, the company that produces
the new trains for the Nord and the Roma Lido, at phantom banks in
Latvia and the Czech Republic, are false. And the new center-right
government - whose transport councilor in Atreju has taken it out on
"left-wing commuters" - is gloating.
As for the construction sites, however, the one for the new Flaminio
station, at the entrance to Villa Borghese, has been at a standstill for
years, because the contractor has a credit of over 5 million euros
unpaid and on December 30 a fire broke out that flooded the Metro A
stations of Flaminio and Piazza di Spagna with smoke, causing panic,
some intoxication and a traffic block. While the works on the line,
perfectly timed to coincide with the start of the Jubilee, are currently
postponed to June and will involve the closure of the extra-urban
section for 15 months and probable narrowing of the Flaminia, therefore
thousands more cars on a less passable road. An apocalypse that could
lead to further postponements.
Already in 2012 a group of commuters fed up with passively suffering the
poor service founded the Comitato Pendolari Ferrovia Roma Nord (1),
which began to punctually report the poor service, carries out valuable
data collection work (for example, it records the number of cancelled
trips on a daily basis), presents complaints and reports, organizes
demonstrations, signature collections, assemblies and public meetings
with the mayors, the presidents of the municipalities along the line,
the heads of the transport companies, provides information to users and
even to the managers of the line, earning recognition both from the
institutions, the media and, above all, from the commuters.
In a peripheral and suburban area where the militant presence of
political and social organizations is reduced to a minimum, it is not
uncommon, however, to meet activists of the Committee distributing
flyers in front of stations or in front of the numerous schools along
the line, whose students accumulate hours of unjustified delay due to
the cancelled journeys, or collecting signatures at the termini or on
the street, with citizens' cars stopping to support a battle perceived
by them (not so much by the mayors) as fundamental for the territory.
Tens of thousands of workers, in addition to the damage of having been
expelled from the center, because with their meager salaries they cannot
afford to live in Rome, must also suffer the mockery of facing a daily
odyssey to go to work by public transport, while even entering the
"green zone" by car is becoming increasingly difficult. In recent years,
the Comitato Pendolari Roma Nord, in close collaboration with the
Comitato Pendolari Roma Lido, and alongside the commuters of the
regional lines of Trenitalia, with whom they sit in a coordination
promoted a few years ago by the CGIL (which also served to defuse
potential tensions between users and transport workers), has been a
thorn in the side of administrations of all political colors, who
have sunk two very important lines, which together with the commuters of
the Campania Circumvesuviana compete every year for the Premio Caronte
assigned by Legambiente to the worst Italian railway lines. The pressure
in terms of opinion exerted in recent years has served to keep the
institutions breathing down their necks and, recently, has contributed,
for example, to averting the scandalous increase in the ticket price
from one euro and 50 to two euros proposed by the mayor of Rome Gualtieri.
At the same time, the continuous and exhausting roundtable discussions,
current and past, with numerous institutional representatives - Lazio
Region, ATAC, Astral, Cotral, Agenzia Roma Mobilità, but also the
National Agency for Railway Safety ANSFISA, mayors and presidents of the
municipalities - have proved to be mostly highly unproductive, so much
so as to push the Committee to reduce its participation. To defend
public transport and more generally the right to mobility regardless of
income and class membership, it is necessary to put in place forms of
mobilization that go beyond the insistent denunciation in the press or
verbal clashes during meetings. If we want to achieve results, we must
become a problem. Easier said than done, of course, because in recent
years persuading commuters to take to the streets has not been easy, but
looking around you see no alternatives.
1) (https://pendolariromanord.com/)
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten