Thirty associations against the Garda cycle route: 'Stop the project immediately

30 May 2023

'Stop the cycle route'. The appeal is launched by the Interregional Coordination for the Protection of the Garda Lake, which brings together some thirty associations and committees, including WWF, Italia Nostra and Legambiente, and which rejects without appeal the Garda cycle route project, a 165 km route (79 on the Brescia coast) with an alleged total cost of 344.5 million euro, financed by the National Road Network. 
The Coordination has written to every possible and imaginable authority, from the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella to the mayors of the lake, passing through Regions, Provinces, Prefectures and Superintendencies. The request is clear: 'to suspend the project along its entire route in order to carry out more in-depth analyses and assess the critical issues raised by local authorities, committees, associations and citizens in order to define a more compatible, sustainable and participatory project'. 
It is also requested to "replace the sections anchored to the rocks, on a cantilevered footbridge, with a very high landscape and environmental impact along 54 km of banks, with a waterway, through the enhancement of navigation, encouraging sustainable mobility with ecological electric boats, increasingly advanced and widespread in northern Europe". 
There are numerous technical criticalities and design shortcomings highlighted. The Coordination recalls, for example, that Lake Garda is an area with a high geological and seismic risk: "To build engineering works, which are essentially useless, very exposed on rocky walls in a seismic zone seems an absolutely inappropriate and inadvisable programme, as well as very costly". 
Costs, indeed. For the Coordinamento, an expenditure of 344.5 million (which, moreover, seems destined to increase) 'does not seem justified for a work that will not provide a solution to traffic but, functioning as a tourist attraction, will bring a further increase in already congested areas'. It is also considered that a cost of more than 2 million per km is exaggerated, 'a good four times the average cost of a cycle route'. 
Other critical points highlighted are land consumption, management costs, the impact on the landscape and the environment, the failure to assess the effects on traffic, and the reduction of the lake's naturalness: 'The cycle route - writes the Coordination - leads to the ruin and unliveability of Lake Garda, not to an increase in its attractiveness. On a lake already struggling with overcrowding and overtourism, the associations say that "Garda does not need to attract more tourists, because it risks collapsing". 
For these and other reasons they call for a halt to everything and 'set up a programme of listening and participatory planning to define a sustainable intervention compatible with the context, a fundamental objective of Pnrr projects'.

(by Simone Bottura - from Il Giornale di Brescia 22 May 2023)