Waste not, want not. Wherever I travel, I look out for ideas for articles that may interest the various publications to which I contribute (Salut! naturally turns me down flat most of the time). Here is the result of a long weekend in gorgeous, overcrowded, seriously overpriced Venice**. The photos are from that break ...
Think Venice and, automatically, you think water.
The heart of this stunningly beautiful city, built on more than 100 islands in a lagoon at the northern summit of the Adriatic Sea, can be explored only by negotiating its canals and crossing its bridges.
For many, the emblem of Venice remains the gondola, the long rowing boat that served for centuries as the main method of getting around.
But these days the gondoliers navigate their craft mainly for short tourist excursions - typically €80 for 40 minutes - or private ceremonies.
In their place as the principal public transport system has developed a bustling network of canal buses, or vaporetti, that carries millions of passengers as effectively as the underground railways of, say, London, Paris and New York.
In harsh economic times, with Italy feeling a particularly chilly financial drought, the service has to contend with dwindling regional funding and rising costs, especially for fuel. And as part of the struggle to balance the books, the public company that runs the canal buses, Azienda del Consorzio Trasporti Veneziano (ACTV), is waging war on fare-dodgers.
The impression gained by many users of the vaporetto service between hotels, bus and railway stations and such tourist magnets as St Mark's Square, the Lido and the islands of Murano and Burano, is of a service that is easy to avoid paying for.
Passengers wander on and off untroubled, for the most part, by ticket control barriers. Boats serving key destinations are often so crowded that even if an inspector appears, only a few travellers will be asked to produce valid tickets before the next stop is reached and observant offenders can smartly disembark.
Failure to produce a ticket carries a fine of €52 plus the cost of a single journey €7 unless the passenger makes the first move, approaching an employee on boarding the boat to offer payment if, for example, ticket machines were out or order. On a busy weekend in May, one ticketless American woman could not claim when challenged to have made any such approach, yet seemed to have little difficulty in convincing an inspector to take no further action than selling her one.
But appearances may be deceptive. ACTV is adamant that it has the problem under control and that with 140 inspectors covering the network, the American was rather fortunate not to have been fined. But officials acknowledge that further action is needed to stop revenue draining away unnecessarily.
"I could talk about this for three days," says Marcello Panettoni, president of the AVM Group, which owns ACTV. "You may be lucky in a short visit and encounter few controls and it is possible to use the service on a single day and not be checked. But you should certainly expect to be asked to produce your ticket if you used the service on, say, three days in a week."
He points out that in a country where fare evasion is a serious issue - the national rate on public transport is around 20 per cent - the vaporetto service's record is comparatively good. Fare-dodging in April, for example, was estimated at just 2.5 per cent, with a total of 612 vaporetto passengers found without tickets and fined, mostly paying on the spot or within days. Last year, inspectors imposed about 50,000 fines, although this figure includes penalties for people using the company's buses on roads away from the canals without paying. Fare-dodging on those buses was estimated at 5.6 per cent last month.
But even if ACTV sees reason to believe it has had some success against cheats, the evasion that does occur costs the company about €1.5 million a year on its own calculations, which may be conservative.
The loss of revenue is especially disturbing at a time of need for financial rigour in the way the service operates. The Veneto regional government reduced its subsidies by €13m in 2012/13 and €8.5m the year before; the figure currently stand at €76m. Meanwhile, annual fuel costs have risen by €4m. There are some 3,000 employees but ACTV insists it wants to make the economies necessary without laying off staff.
"We are trying to reorganise services and find economies without sacrificing the service to the public or having to lose employees," Mr Panettoni says.
"We are going to eliminate some journeys rarely used and re-organise the whole company starting from a strong spending review. We are cutting and reducing all company costs, re-organising all services in order to be more competitive and efficient."
This suggests greater savings are needed than the €6.7m economies found in 2012.
The reduction if not eradication of cheating has a small but important part to play. Ticket control barriers have been introduced at a few key stops, including Tronchetto, Accademia and others on the tourist trail, and more are planned.
They would not be practical for safety reasons at all the network's 80 stops but Mr Panettoni, who is also president of Italy's public transport operators' association, insists that controls are already energetically enforced. Inspectors target each of the 23 lines every other day in rotation.
He does promise further measures, however. "We want to improve it further by a combination of technology and staff, with control barriers at more stations and more people to carry out controls on board," he says.
The aim is to make the system as cheat-proof as, for example, the London Underground or Paris Metro where those seeking to avoid paying have to vault barriers or "double up" with paying customers as they pass through.
Checks are being stepped up at some of the busiest stops such as Rialto, Piazzale Roma and the railway station, and more staff will be used to verify tickets before passengers board the boats if installing new barriers is not an option. "I can assure you that only a few people could escape our controls," the president says.
Venice attracts 26 million visitors a year and the vast majority rely for part of their transport needs on the vaporetto routes.
"The importance of public transport is becoming nowadays fundamental," Mr Panettoni adds. "European cities and especially Italian ones are not suitable for private transport because of their structure and the presence of numerous historical monuments.
"In Venice, we must make a bigger effort compared with other cities because we are managing public transport on water, with all the problems and costs that means.
"But we have to connect places and people and have to be 'green', investing money to be more and more environmental respectful. This is the aim for the future: let our city be more liveable."
*******
The Age of the Vaporetto
Until the 19th Century, Venice - its two main parts divided by the Grand Canal and known by the translation from Italian of "over here" and "over there" - had only one bridge, the Rialto.
Swarms of ferries carried people and merchandise to and from each side.
As late as the second half of the 12th Century, when the pontoon-style ancestor of the original Ponte di Rialto was built, the city had no dry crossing at all.
Now there are four bridges connecting north and south across the Grand Canal.
Their importance to citydwellers, traders and tourists alike is immeasurable but even their benefits are outweighed by the contribution to daily life made by the vaporetto service, the fleet of 163 small boats, originally steamers, that connect all parts of the city centre and the surrounding inhabited islands.
The service was launched in 1881, to the initial fury of gondoliers who rightly feared tough competition.
Need triumphed over sentiment and the first eight vaporetti, or canal buses, were built in the north-western French city of Rouen and delivered to Venice via France's Languedoc canal and a circuit of the Italian cost.
The service is financed by ticket sales plus a subsidy from provincial government that is steadily falling as Italy grapples with economic crisis.
Figures for the past few years illustrate Venice's appeal to tourists from every corner of the world, with considerable growth in passenger volume except during the worst of the economic crisis, notably 2008 when numbers declined by more than 7 million, from 102,874,078 in 2007 to 95,861,460 in 2008. Since then they have steadily recovered.
In addition to seeking savings on operating costs, the ACTV public transport company that runs the service has introduced a waterborne equivalent of the "hop on, hop off" buses found on the streets of some of the world's capital cities.
The Vaporetto dell'Arte was launched in June and 64,000 people travelled on the three buses in what remained of the first year. Numbers are sharply increasing so that last month, half as many again bought tickets compared with the first month of operation last summer. With the main tourism season yet to start, more progress is certain.
For the main vaporetto service, fares seem steep, €7 for a single journey although the busy tourist will make considerable savings with travel passes; as an example, a 36-hour pass costs €25, less than the cost of four single journeys.
Tourists may not appreciate the fact that what they pay heavily subsidises transport for locals. Residents of Venice and the Veneto region buy the "cartavenezia", five-year passes for €10 and €20, respectively, and these entitle them to cut-rate travel at just €1.30 a journey.
Any citizen of European Union member states can purchase passes to obtain the same privileges but theirs cost €40 each. Consequently, the vast majority of the 45,000 passes in circulation are in the hands of people living in the city or region.
The most popular vaporetto routes are lines 1 and 2. The first takes a zigzagging route between 20 stations from the Piazzale Roma to the Lido.
As well as being a practical way of getting to and from sightseeing locations, it offers a striking tour of the elegant banks of the Grand Canal, thus ensuring packed boats with space on the outer decks scarce from spring to autumn.
Line 2 is an express service operating from San Zaccaria, near the Piazza San Marco and cutting through the Giudecca Canal to the Piazzale Roma and the railway station. Boats continue to serve the main lines into the small hours.
ACTV's fleet of onland buses comprises more than 600 vehicles carrying 80 million passengers annually.
The cluster of islands making up central Venice is connected to the mainland by the Ponte della Libertà, a long road bridge opened in 1933 by the Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
** See my work for The National, Abu Dhabi, including these items, at the following link: http://www.thenational.ae/authors/colin-randall
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