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Comment by silcoon | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the Italian highways were a high engineering project. Even the asphalt quality that still used today has the ability to absorb water pretty quickly and don’t leave dangerous patches of water on the road with heavy rains.

The problem is that all the highway projects, despite being government financed, are now mostly in the hand of large private companies and rich families (Benetton) which made the price usage skyrocket. Traveling by car in Italy is now expensive for residents, and the alternative roads are slow and dangerous. In Switzerland the annual highway subscription is ~€40

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> Traveling by car in Italy is now expensive for residents, and the alternative roads are slow and dangerous.

This is quite the generalisation. Slow? Yes for obvious reasons. The speed limit is a lot lower compared to highways. Dangerous? That's silly. Not sure why driving 70kmh on a country road is more dangerous than going 130kmh on a highway.

It all depends where you're going. Some roads are plain bad, others are excellent.

> Not sure why driving 70kmh on a country road is more dangerous than going 130kmh on a highway.

If you hit the edge of the highway, you'll likely bounce off the barrier and survive.

If you go over the edge of a national road at 70kmh you'll likely end up in a ditch/roll the car, dangerous at any speed.

If you hit the edge of the highway at 130kmh you'll likely bounce back onto incoming traffic that's also going 130kmh.

Highways are less dangerous in general simply because of the way you drive on them because there are no crossroads or roundabouts or stop lights and the traffic is a lot more predictable.

But I'd not call other roads "dangerous".

Motorways have safety barriers between opposing traffic. They're quite good at stopping cars. Trucks, not so much unless they're concrete, or newer steel barriers of higher class.

Yes but motorways are always multilane so there is traffic going in the same direction. And if I'm hitting a barrier at 130km with 3 other lanes of cars going at 130kmh in the same direction chances are someone's going to hit me.

Europe doesn't have many places with 4 lanes (I'd say only at junctions for 1km or such) and I hope it never gets either.

3 + emergency aren’t that uncommon here in northern Italy.

Speed limit is 90kmh on most European roads.

But that's not the important factor. On the motorway you just turn on cruise control, set it to 120/130kmh, and the car essentially drives itself. There are no crossings, curves are gentle, and everyone is driving more or less at the same speed.

On the roads you do have to watch out for a lot of things, there might be traffic lights, roundabouts, zebra crossings, the speed limit constantly changes from when you cross a town or crossroads, slow vehicles like tractors or even cyclists... So you have to pay constant attention for longer, it is tiring and a tired driver means the chances for an accident are higher.

> So you have to pay constant attention for longer, it is tiring and a tired driver means the chances for an accident are higher.

Don't disagree with that but do disagree with your line of reasoning. Driving the same speed, for hours, on cruise, makes zoning out way more easy. And at 130kmh+ things happen way faster and so you have to be extra engaged to void potentially deadly crashes.

As I said in another comment, they're less dangerous because of the way the traffic works but if you look at the numbers, the fatalities to crashes ratio isn't all that different between highways and country roads.

Volume is obviously different, but there's also fewer people driving on highways than regular roads.

Still, I'd not say that driving on highways is safe while driving on country roads is dangerous. They're both dangerous, just for different reasons.

Highways are now public infrastructure again after buying them back from benetton. 8 billions euro. they got them for free. we just gifted 8 billion to one of the richest families. wow.

they have always been "public infrastructure", private entities have been delegated to "run" it (concessione), so nobody got it for free. The Benetton family had a (very lucrative) contracts to run many highways: yes, many contracts are now back to the public sector

This is false.

do i need to link the news or can you find it on your own?

The Swiss vignette doesn't come close to covering the actual cost of the motorways.

10 million vignettes sold, 40 CHF each, ~400M CHF gross revenue.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/what-you-need-to-know-...

12 billion CHF over 3 years, 4 billion a year, improving current roads and building new roads.

https://lenews.ch/2022/01/28/swiss-government-forecasts-12-b...

Of course this includes all public roads, not just motorways, but the point stands: the motorways are not privatized and funded by tolls, the tolls just help a bit. And of course it gets tourists to pay too.

To be fair, Italy is about 7 times the size of Switzerland. Italy has the Alps too, although that doesn't explain the ridiculous prices of using the motorway in the Po valley... the only place that I know of which is more expensive is Portugal, which doesn't even have that many motorways, but for the average salary driving there is a luxury.

In Portugal it is indeed very expensive, but one we have to deal with. There are no free alternatives to some routes.

For example, one of the most common route in and out of Portugal (if not the most common), A25/E80, has no free alternative.

Expensive as it should be

Care to explain why? Vast majority of highways in Italy are owned by the state. And we already pay taxes.

They are owned by the state, but they are not managed by the state but Autostrade per L'Italia SPA.

Yes. And Holding Reti Autostradali S.p.A. owns the 88% of that SPA. And CDP S.p.A[0] owns 51% of that Holding. And the Ministry of Economy and Finance owns 83% of the CDP. So it's just a convoluted way to say that the state owns the majority of it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassa_Depositi_e_Prestiti

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