Day-trippers will have to pay €5 to visit Italian city under scheme designed to protect it from excess tourism
Authorities in Venice have been accused of transforming the famous lagoon city into a “theme park” as a long-mooted entrance fee for day trippers comes into force.
Venice is the first major city in the world to enact such a scheme. The €5 (£4.30) charge, which comes into force today, is aimed at protecting the Unesco world heritage site from the effects of excessive tourism by deterring day trippers and, according to the mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, making the city “livable” again.
But several residents’ committees and associations have planned protests for Thursday, arguing that the fee will do nothing to resolve the issue.
“I can tell you that almost the entire city is against it,” claimed Matteo Secchi, who leads Venessia.com, a residents’ activist group. “You can’t impose an entrance fee to a city; all they’re doing is transforming it into a theme park. This is a bad image for Venice … I mean, are we joking?”
I find it surprising that it’s unpopular with the residents
My (admittedly naive) understanding was that tourism keeps increasing and there’s no way to build more space, so Venice has become overcrowded and is potentially at risk of sinking?
Sure it’s not great to have to impose a restriction like this, but there aren’t many other ways to reduce the number of people going to a place that they want to go to.
Other than the poor optics of charging entrance as if it’s a theme park, the fee might also embolden some of the more obnoxious tourists in behaving like they would at an ACTUAL theme park rather than how they would as guests in a “real” city, in order to “get their money’s worth”.
Yeah, people definitely have a tendency to act entitled just because they’ve paid money.
It reminds me of this story from Freakonomics:
The economists decided to test their solution by conducting a study of ten day-care centers in Haifa, Israel. The study lasted twenty weeks, but the fine was not introduced immediately. For the first four weeks, the economists simply kept track of the number of parents who came late; there were, on average, eight late pickups per week per day-care center. In the fifth week, the fine was enacted. It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents’ monthly bill, which was roughly $380.
After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went… up. Before long there were twenty late pickups per week, more than double the original average. The incentive had plainly backfired.
Interesting story. $3 is worth it for a few minutes of extra child care.
I wonder if they had charged $1 a minute that the parent was late, if that would have nipped the problem in the bud.
I heard that one school (maybe the same school?) had success with a “three strikes and then you find yourself another school” policy.
Wow, that seems unnecessarily harsh.
“Venice is the first major city in the world to enact such a scheme.”
London has been charging an entry fee for it’s downtown core for years now.
https://www.visitlondon.com/traveller-information/getting-around-london/congestion-charge
That’s only for vehicles. It isn’t the same thing.
It’s essentially the same thing. Too many people are coming, so charge them a fee. The only reason Venice is per person and not per vehicle is that it’s an island, it’s not like you can drive there.
You can drive in Venice. Well, you could if you’d removed all the tourists.
There is a difference in intent.
The congestion charge in London and other cities is just for cars whole the cities generally provide good mass transit across the toll line.
Venice is charging an admission fee to all tourists no matter how they arrive. Given how low the fee is, all it will probably do is raise revenue for the local government.
It’s essentially the same thing. Too many people are coming, so charge them a fee.
No, it’s not the same thing. Cars don’t have a place in the cities, cities are for humans.
