Bologna: Bolognina neighborhood

As part of the implementation of the 1995 P.U.T. Urban Traffic Plan (P.U.T. - Piano Urbano del Traffico), traffic patterns in Bolognina, a neighbourhood located North of the main railway station, were rearranged in the second half of the 1990s. Via Matteotti, the main north-south route leading to the city center, is a major transit thoroughfare that carries more than 950 buses in each direction each day, and up to 180 during the morning two-hour peak (7-9 am). As part of the traffic plan, Via Matteotti was reorganized to divert through traffic: two blocks were converted from curbside transit lanes to a transit street (A1), the crossing street was dead-ended (L4), and two more blocks were converted to a contraflow transit lane configuration. At the same time, the streets lining Piazza dell’Unità on the eastern and western sides were reserved for transit vehicles only. The road that cut diagonally through the square, connecting Via Corticella to Via Matteotti, was closed to traffic and converted into a basketball court.

Following this arrangement, the main inbound and outbound general traffic flows have been rerouted through two alternative routes forming a loop around the core of the neighbourhood. Local streets’ circulation had already been arranged in one-way loops since the mid-1960s to discourage through traffic, while some streets were pedestrianized during the 1990s to locate a neighbourhood market. The major streets leading to via Matteotti and carrying high-frequency trunk routes (via dell’Arcoveggio, di Corticella, della Liberazione, Creti, and Serlio) had already been redesigned with short segments of contraflow traffic lanes to divert through traffic in one direction and establish priority corridors for transit between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.