You might think it’s a day late, but it did take the BBC a whole day to make it the top Europe story on their website. I’m talking about Milan’s new Congestion Charge – called the Ecopass, here.

So first, to all our friends, no, we don’t live within the Ecopass zone. We live (just) outside it. The BBC report is here, in case you haven’t heard about it or read it. The trouble is, like most things that you read about/hear about, the truth is not exactly as it is depicted.

Firstly, the charge, unlike London, is graded. It is based on the emissions from your car. Here, your car falls into certain bands. So, our current car is class 2. Level 2 means that we can, if we choose, enter the zone free of charge, since it’s emissions are low (ish). Also, in spite of the quoted cost being €10 (£7.50) per day, this will only affect the most polluting cars. Most people (with cars that aren’t so old) will pay about €2 per day. And, to be honest, as most people here have cars that are less than a few years old, they will be class 1 or 2, which means they pay nothing.

By ‘electronic gates’ they mean entry points into the zone which, like London, have banks of cameras to record the car number plates. Now this will be interesting. They have general problems here with IT in that, in general, it’s not so good, particularly when done by the public sector. So, shock, horror, the website didn’t work so well! So, methinks, how are they going to tie up the car number plate with the car registration system? Let’s see what happens.

Generally, we (I) avoid using the car in Milan. It’s always a pain to find somewhere to park, and the public transport here is really good, in my opinion. So, I only use the car to travel to work and when we go away from Milan. My route to and from work covers the roads on the edge (but just outside) the zone and we have no reason to drive into the zone itself.

But, when everyone comes back from their holidays (next week), then we shall see what effect it really has. In theory, traffic may well be much heavier on my routes for work, on the basis that people who previously went through the middle of town will now be going round it! And, of course, potentially, parking will become more of a nightmare in our area as people will be parking just outside the zone – exactly where we live. Although it’s residents’ and metered parking, my guess is that will take a few hefty fines before people pay attention to the limited parking.

So, next week will be the key. What I did find funny was when the BBC report suggested that traffic was 40% lower. Well ..yes ..but for this week (the week before the 6^th) at least half the people are away (even the offices here resemble the Marie Celeste), so one would expect the traffic to be lower than normal. Also, this year, because the 6^th is on Sunday, it means people only have to have 3 days holiday to make up the rest of the week, so, I think, even more people are staying away than usual.

On the plus side they intend to make the public transport even better and put on more trams and buses AND they really do need to do something to clean up one of the most polluted cities in Europe.

And we had an incredible number of visits to this site, yesterday. Most visitors are typing in the URL directly and going to the homepage. I still can’t work out what they are looking for but, almost certainly, given the fact that they rarely go further and they are on the site for only seconds, it is not what they were expecting. So why are you typing in vanda.co.uk? What did you think you were going to find? Apart from some porn site (but, then, it’s highly unlikely to be .co.uk) the only other thing I can think of is the V&A Museum.

Now they once had the site but let it go. Their site is now vam.ac.uk, but they do have vandashop.com, vandaimages.com and vandaprints.com, so one would have thought it would have made sense to have kept vanda.co.uk and not let it go. Ah, well, it’s ours now.