I offer a different point of view from southern europe: during the crisis, 2008-2015, investment on infrastructure was very little and we hardly ever added new roads, especially large projects.
Now that there’s some money floating around again for a couple years, mew bridges and joins and larger road works look more common everywhere.
From here it looks like that google mapping quality is more or less the same, but the rate of change of the urban landscape increased leaving a larger gap between actual and mapped.
(That is for maps alone, street view is extremely outdated across all Italy)
The service level in Italy was unbelievably bad for a time, then got much better, with occasional dramatic drops in quality.
The problem is that (like in many areas) our collective subjective memory of things lags behind reality, sometimes by decades.
Things get enshrined deep in culture (not only films, but day to day jokes and mechanical repetition of cultural self-flagellation).
I'm living in Italy for almost 20y now, coming from Switzerland. I came here in part because I wanted the experience of a more chaotic place, coming from the extreme order in Switzerland I found confining and suffocating.
Central Italy in the 2000s was a good mixture of chaos and infrastructure that worked ok in order to have a civilized life. Roads had potholes but they did exist, it's wasn't Madagascar level bad.
Yet italians complained and complained and kept saying that they were backward country and looked up at Germany or the Netherlands or whatnot.
Over the years everything got incrementally improved. Roundabouts got built, green grass inside roundabouts got actually cut, parking spaces started to be delimited and you no longer had to park your car in the mud alongside a road (but now you had to pay for parking in more places) ...
And also trains got better! Objectively better. And more expensive. They were incredibly dirt cheap 20 years ago, now they are not too expensive but it's an entirely different ballpark.
20 years ago my average experience from Pisa to Florence was to suffocate for 50 minutes because somebody let a puddle of vomit uncleaned in the train and there was no physical space to go to escape that because the train was so packed.
Now trains are much cleaner, more frequent, bigger, faster, ...
Occasionally you get stuck in a tunnel for a couple of hours because something breaks but hey it only happen to me once in the last 10 years and it happened 10 times the decade before, so improvement!!
Yet, locals still think nothing improved. Yesterday I had a conversation with Italians who thought they were the country with the worst infrastructure. The thing is, most people here live in an imaginary world.
Even when they do travel abroad, they don't update their beliefs about that stuff. It's a bit like identity politics. They watch TV journalism shows that show how well executed (cherry picked) public systems in other countries work, and bask in self-flagellation. While the other identity group declares how Italians are the best in the world and that nothing approaches their virtues etc. these two camps (I struggle identifying them as left and right anymore) affect each other and make their position even stronger.
Saying this as an Italian, your statement misses a [1].
In the last 20-30 years there have been huge improvements on a handful of (highly trafficated) routes, and a corresponding amount of worsening in all the rest.
Besides the so-called "digital divide" (widely different possibilities of access to the internet depending on your location), there is a clear "railroad divide", the biggest/main cities are well connected, all the rest is at the same level as (or worse than) the '60's (or even earlier).
There is a way to draw maps abstracting from geometrical projections (anamorphic), based on some given parameters, if you choose "travel time by train" what you will get will be a "time cartogram" where Italy is very short (north-south) but very, vey thick (west-east).
I just spent some time driving in the Italian countryside. Dreadful if you are used to relatively newer infrastructure, but the people that are used to it don't seem to have an issue! It was terrifying.
If it can make you feel better, I know a lot of Italian cities are going back to trams in dedicated lanes. This is on the back of the clear advantages enjoyed by those cities (Rome, Milan) who didn't actually rip out all tracks after the last war.
There is an element of busywork too: local officials are always elected by promising change, they have to be seen doing something. So on odd years they put in something, and in even years they take it out...
I agree with Antirez on the fear: I call this the "Google Maps effect", the more you use Google Maps, the less you learn about city streets, etc.
By the way, I am Italian too; I lived in the US (SF) for ~10 years, and I speak (I think) a pretty good English.
More than 20 years ago I wrote a novel, Nonovvio, in Italian. A couple of months ago I decided to translate it to English, using GPT-4.
Here you can find both the (original) Italian version, and the one created with GPT-4. [0].
I don't think the novel is amazing nor a work of art; however, what I find interesting is how prescient I was on a number of things that happened after I finished writing it in the early 2000s.
Construction involving digging is nearly impossible in most European cities because it's impossible to dig without hitting ruins. Rural areas aren't that much better. And it all has SOME historic value.
For the most part, now it's 'take pictures, grab anything that looks particularly interesting, and bulldoze on'.
At some point, especially if you're a random not-super-wealthy farmer in the middle of nowhere, you have to go 'fuck it, whatever' or you're going to not get anything done.
I'm always amazed, given how corrupt Italy is - their infrastructure is incredibly advanced. Silky smooth highways and very impressive rail infrastructure.
It's not just Rome, I saw this in other Italian cities as well. The tourist areas are well-manicured, naturally, but the outskirts of many Italian cities are crumbling. Infrastructure is generally outdated and poorly designed, if not actively falling apart. The Italy of postcards and travel videos is a far cry from the Italy most Italians live in.
Italy had a corruption problem a few decades ago. They have done some major reform and things are better, but the reputation remains.
Note that Italy is not perfect. And like all cases of corruption it is worse in some areas than others. The construction costs project is about mass transit where Italy does fairly well, but they don't look at highways so we cannot say anything about how they do highways from the data here. (I'm sure someone reading this knows more than I do about Itally's highways and can comment)
Wow it takes effort to be slower than Italy. :) There are some infamous cases here of highways taking decades to complete (and also some positive experiences such as an awesome high speed rail network).
I think it depends heavily on which infrastructure you're talking about though and what parts of the project you're considering. Some countries may be faster at obtaining permits and/or finding the money, and others may be faster at actually building the thing; my impression is that Italy absolutely sucks at the former, but some projects are also slowed down by the sheer amount of archaeological finds that you stumble upon when digging under Rome or Naples.
Have to concur unfortunately, if we're talking about the South of Italy. Their infrastructure is nowhere close to the one in the North. And I can imagine rural will have even less.
There's plenty of books written about this topic. In recent experience, I remember the World Expo Milan fair in 2015, L'Aquila earthquake works, or even the Coronavirus Hospital in Milano - 21 milion euros to host 25 patients - all ended up with arrests due to corruption.
In the past the legendary motorway Salerno-Reggio Calabria took decades to complete and was a major attraction for public investment and mafia suppliers.
These days, the government is thinking about building a bridge between Calabria and Sicily. This project has been talked about for decades, it's completely useless (I won't go in detail here, but the road network in southern Italy is in a really bad state) and with the upcoming European Union injection of money, it will become the next public work that the mafia will put their hands onto. Looking at the history, it's clear why this project became suddenly important.
Also, don’t forget about the corruption. And the environmental protests. And the corruption.
The article contained almost more references about corruption and environmental protests than technical info. I don’t know how other places work, but in Europe, big infrastructure projects are almost always mired with corruption.
The article read like: “wow, these dumb and greasy Italians finally managed to do something impressive. But they are still corrupt. And their project is not eco friendly. Hah, those Italians...” And I’m not even Italian, but I can smell that snobbism from a mile.
Italy's roads aren't that bad, actually (at least in the north). The problem is that they are covered with Italian drivers, and there are an awful lot of them: 60 million in an area a bit smaller than California. (Well, 60 million inhabitants - not all of them drive, but more drive than they ought to)
I’ve been to a good amount of Italian cities and would agree it’s the same mess of cars all over the place, like anywhere else. I also went to Rome for the first time half a year ago and it wasn’t the mess of cars and Vespas I imagined it was going to be, so hey, perhaps Rome is the anomaly.
Now that there’s some money floating around again for a couple years, mew bridges and joins and larger road works look more common everywhere.
From here it looks like that google mapping quality is more or less the same, but the rate of change of the urban landscape increased leaving a larger gap between actual and mapped.
(That is for maps alone, street view is extremely outdated across all Italy)
reply