gained momentum and the development of a national highway system became one of the
main goals of the economic planners.
At that time IRI, through its affiliate Società Autostrade, made massive investments
and played a leading role in boosting the growth of the network, but private companies
also received concessions from the state and the highway system rapidly expanded from
1,500 to nearly 5,000 km. The industrialized regions of northern and central Italy came to
be increasingly connected by high-speed motorways which also linked to northern
Europe through long tunnels passing under the Alps, and for the first time the network
was also extended southwards through long-distance highways along both the Adriatic
and Tyrrhenian coasts. The Mezzogiorno (southern Italy) was thus brought nearer to the
rest of Italy, but it nevertheless continued to suffer a wide gap in comparison with the rest
of the country, while the main legs—the north-south motorway Milan to Rome, the so-
called Autostrada del Sole (Sun Highway), and the west—east leg Turin to Trieste—
became increasingly congested. This situation provoked widespread public
dissatisfaction, as traffic by both private cars and trucks grew dramatically (the vehicles
per km ratio increased from about 15,000 a year in 1970 to over 55,000 in the early
1990s) and conditions, especially in peak holiday periods, deteriorated. In fact, public
investments were stopped in the mid-1970s and the autostrada network has remained
practically at a standstill ever since (there were 5,550 km of toll highways and tunnels in
mid-1990s, plus some 900 km of non-toll routes). Subsequently, both Società Autostrade
and private concessionaire companies submitted a cluster of new plans to the Ministry for
Public Works, related mainly to projects for the building of 1,000 km of new highways in
the industrialized northern regions, but none of these have been carried out. Another
project for doubling the 90 km Florence to Bologna leg across the Apennine mountains
(actually the most crowded highway in Italy, with up to 50,000 vehicles a day and daily
traffic jams) provoked fierce opposition from environmentalist organizations, not to
mention wearisome bargaining between national and local governments, and so exists
only on paper. Plans for a badly needed refurbishment of the southern route from Salerno
to Reggio Calabria (a non-toll and thus unprofitable highway) were also pigeonholed.
Yet managing autostradas has been a remarkable source of profits in recent years, as
both traffic and tolls have continued to increase; it is not by chance that concerns such as
Fiat (through its affiliate Fiatimpresit) and other large building companies have enlarged
their shareholdings in private concessionaires, which already run nearly 45 per cent of the
toll highways network. Large cash flow and high profitability were expected to aid the
privatization of Società Autostrade, which was announced in 1997 by the Prodi
government, but this venture suddenly faded. As the expected extension of the state
concession’s expiry date from 2018 to 2038 was rejected by the Corte dei Conti (Court of
Accounts), Autostrade’s shares plummeted on the stock market and the interest of would-
be private shareholders declined. A new programme of privatization was announced by
the D’Alema government in 1999. Nevertheless, whatever the future of Società
Autostrade, the highway system is in need of action. Northern industry—responsible for
50 per cent of GDP and 65 per cent of all exports—has been expressing alarm at the loss
of competitiveness caused by a transport system on the verge of a collapse both
domestically and in terms of international links, especially in the northeast where Austria
frequently denies transit permission to Italian trucks for environmental reasons. A
massive effort to modernize the transport network as a whole (not only motorways but
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