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www.timesoneline. Gridlock on the Grand Canal has obliged the authorities in Venice to introduce the aquatic equivalent of bus lanes and curtail the lucrative trade of gondoliers in an attempt to end traffic chaos and a mounting accident toll.
However, the crackdown, which includes limits on traffic, stops short of a congestion charge, for the time being.
Paolo Costa, the Mayor of Venice, said that the new measures amounted to a “morning curfew”. He said that the period up to midday “is when the Grand Canal is at its busiest.
“It has got to the point where congestion on the canal resembles a jam-packed motorway on a public holiday.”
The mayor said that the gondoliers’ custom of taking tourists out to be serenaded in a convoy of gondolas would have to stop, “at least in the mornings”. Officials said that it would continue in the afternoons and evenings.
The majority of visitors to Venice are day-trippers, who cruise the canals in the morning and leave after lunch.
With water taxis, vaporetti — the city’s buses — and boats delivering goods, the city’s 400 gondolas formed “a serious obstacle to navigation”, officials said.
Under the measures, due to come into force by the end of this month, cargo boats and barges can unload goods only between 10am and 11am. Vaporetti will be confined to strictly defined lanes and only licensed water taxis will be allowed to ply the Grand Canal, a measure designed to keep out “pirate taxis”. There will also be stricter speed limits for all traffic.
Franco Vianello Moro, head of the Gondoliers’ Association, said that traffic on the Grand Canal had gone up 30 per cent in the past two years, with 2,000 vessels a day plying up and down the 4km (2.4mile) stretch. He said that since 1992 there had been “innumerable accidents” that had included seven deaths.
Pierpaolo Simion, a gondolier, said that it was “only thanks to our skill” that there had not been more deaths.
This month gondoliers staged a mass protest during the Venice Regatta.
Roberto Luppi, a spokesman for the gondoliers, said: “Things cannot go on like this. The amount of traffic is just crazy. Venice is on the verge of collapse, we have reached saturation point.”
Last Sunday a tourist launch and a vaporetto collided in the Giudecca canal, injuring dozens of passengers in both vessels. Several were taken to hospital.
Manuele Medoro, the Venice official in charge of traffic control, said that a congestion charge on the Grand Canal was at present “impractical. It would punish the tour boat operators, and Venice lives from tourism.” Signor Moro said that gondoliers were being penalised unfairly. “We account for only 6 per cent of canal traffic,” he said. | 
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