Riva West Ring Road: Accelerated Planning and Cost-Saving Urgency

The timetable for the Riva west ring road project today includes the first of two official consultations aimed at bringing the project into the execution phase as quickly as possible. The province’s urgency, after twenty years of waiting and talking, is underscored by the fact that each day saved on the 25-month scheduled construction would earn a reward of 10 million euros: finishing three months early would save the contracting province about one billion euros.

The formal consultation, permitted for projects of particular importance, acts as a useful shortcut, devised to shorten what has become an unbearably long process. The five-year term of a capable administration’s natural term continues to be too brief for any public work to be completed.

Involvement of authorities and planning procedure

The heads of departments for traffic, urban planning, environmental protection, mountain basins, fire prevention, geological issues, and the provincial technical committee, along with mayors of Riva and Arco, all meet together at once to review the project with technical staff. Each of them is responsible for issuing an approval within their respective domain.

Rather than having the project pass through multiple offices, now all office managers gather around the project itself. Most likely, the date for the second and final consultation will be set today: at that meeting, once all departments have completed their review and assessment, approval will be granted, allowing the project to move into the execution phase (which coincides with the start of the expropriation procedures for the necessary land).

This second consultation could take place within a couple of months. The main obstacles likely to be encountered today are of two types. One concerns expropriations: if the landowner accepts the compensation offer based on the estimates provided by the offices, the process can proceed quickly. If even one owner refuses, it becomes impossible to estimate the duration of the delays (as Pigarelli’s small experiences teach us).

Urban planning aspects and procedures

The other obstacle is of an urbanistic nature. The ring road, along with the classification of the Baltera fairground zone, is among the cases where Riva’s urban master plan (PRG) conflicts with the older provincial urban plan. However, major roadways are defined by the Pup (Provincial Urban Plan), and the PRG must align accordingly.

Consequently, it is impossible to approve a PRG that contains a major roadway incompatible with the one in the Pup, even if the “correct” version is that of the PRG. Everything should be resolved with the so-called “variantina” to the Pup, which President Dellai is diligently trying to push through, since revising the urban planning tool would take too long.

However, even for the “variantina,” delays could push the process into spring 2001, which for Riva would mean a wasted time frame.