Monza approves its first Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan

At the start of April 2024, the City Council of Monza, Italy, approved its first Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP). Spread over a horizon of 10 years, its main focus is on addressing a modal shift, by cutting car trips by 50% and increasing the modal shares of public transport and active mobility by 30% and 20%, respectively. Today, two-thirds of trips are carried out by private car, and only 17% by public transport and 16% walking and cycling.

Monza has structured its SUMP alongside main objectives that define the actions for the next 10 years:

• To make the city innovative and sustainable, actions will concentrate on creating a traffic management centre, electrifying the bus fleet, optimising the parking management regime, rationalising urban logistics, limiting circulation of polluting vehicles, and raising awareness for shared, sustainable, and multimodal mobility services.
• To make the city accessible and inclusive, multimodal mobility hubs will be improved and installed alongside the extension of metro line M5 adding 7 stations to the service.
• To make the city attractive, the bus service will be reviewed and improved for daily services as well as for large scale events, infrastructure solutions will be installed to improve road safety conditions primarily for school trips and at critical nodes of the road network, and awareness raising actions will be used in addressing schools to foster active and safe school trips.
• To make the city polycentric, environmental islands and pedestrian spaces will be installed across the territory focusing on areas of urban, social, and economic importance. The speed 30 zone is gradually extended to the entire secondary and local road network. Mobility management actions work on rationalising home-work travel.

Mayor of Monza, Paolo Pilotto, stated: “We intend to field concrete actions to improve urban quality: for this reason the approach to mobility issues places the protection of the environment and the health of citizens at the centre, thinking about mobility models that are increasingly attentive to social, environmental and economic data".

Estimates for the SUMP's delivery impact forecast an approximately 30% reduction in nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulate matter emissions, as well as a significant reduction in noise pollution.

The plan places people's mobility needs at the centre, following a participatory development approach that involved active involvement of citizens and city users. After its adoption by the council, the plan will be online and open to further comments for 60 days and will then pass for final approval by the city council.