Policy Brief 62 - Stranded Infrastructure: A PNRR Case Study on Milan’s Cycling Network
Why Kilometer-Based Reporting Is Not Enough For Cycling Policy. A Policy Brief by Vladimir Simić
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FilePB62_STRANDED INFRASTRUCTURE.pdf (1.09 MB)
Executive Summary
As the PNRR approaches its 2026 closure, the evaluation of Italy’s largest national recovery plan financed under NextGenerationEU is moving from disbursement tracking toward an assessment of what the funded investment has achieved.
That assessment will depend heavily on which indicators are chosen, a point already raised within the IEP@BU policy-brief series (Boeri and Perotti, 2026; Leonardi, 2026). Boeri and Perotti (2026) identify formalism over substance as one of the principal flaws of the plan, describing how milestones and targets can foster a “spreadsheet culture” in which numerical compliance substitutes for the policy outcomes the indicators were meant to capture.
This brief takes that diagnosis down to the level of a single measure. The PNRR urban cycling sub-investment (M2C2, Investment 4.1.2), governed by MIT Decree 509/2021, ties funding to kilometer-based delivery targets together with corridor-level requirements linking universities to interchange nodes. While the framework makes construction progress visible and auditable, it does not show whether the wider network being built is cohering into a usable system, and Milan provides a case where that gap can be measured directly against municipal data.
Using official municipal geospatial data classified under the Italian Codice della Strada, the brief isolates Milan's dedicated cycling infrastructure and assesses how far it functions as a connected network.
The results show severe fragmentation. Of 202.9 km of dedicated cycling infrastructure, 88.2% lies outside the largest connected component. District-level analysis shows that this fragmentation is not evenly distributed, with several outer districts combining substantial provision with high stranded shares. A comparison with Barcelona and Paris indicates that this outcome is not an inevitable consequence of network scale. The indicator gap is therefore empirical, and, in Milan, under this measure, it is observable in the data.
Milan's latest Möves plan recognizes the underlying issue, framing the cycling network qualitatively in terms of continuity and recognizability. The operationalization gap, however, remains. Milan has the strategic vision yet lacks the indicator framework to act on it, and this is precisely the kind of indicator-design gap that performance-based EU funding will need to address if it is to deliver on the institutional advance Leonardi (2026) attributes to it. The same pattern extends well beyond Milan.
Kilometer-based delivery targets are the dominant monitoring standard across EU and national cycling-funding instruments, which means the indicator gap identified here is structural rather than local. On this basis the brief advances three recommendations, developed in full at the end.
First, EU and national funding frameworks should complement kilometer-based delivery targets with standardized network-cohesion indicators capable of registering whether funded segments are assembling into a coherent system.
Second, municipal and metropolitan authorities should incorporate fragmentation diagnostics into project appraisal, giving explicit weight to interventions that close gaps and reinforce the main connected spine.
Third, in already fragmented networks, investment should be sequenced toward consolidation before further outward expansion.
Key Findings
▸ Milan's headline cycling figure does not describe a coherent cycling network. Of the 336 km reported by the city, only 203 km qualifies as dedicated cycling infrastructure under the Codice della Strada, and within that dedicated network 88.2% lies outside the city's main connected spine. The issue is therefore not only how much infrastructure Milan reports, but how much of it functions as part of a continuous system.
▸ The gap between reported provision and functional coherence is evaluative as much as physical. The PNRR's urban cycling measure verifies kilometers delivered and the completion of specified university-to-interchange corridors. Beyond these two levels, however, the decree contains no requirement or mechanism for registering how the kilometers counted against the target relate to one another or to the wider municipal cycling network.
▸ EU and national funding frameworks should complement kilometer-based delivery targets with standardized network-cohesion indicators. Kilometer-based delivery targets are the standard form of performance-based funding under the Recovery and Resilience Facility, and the Commission's July 2025 proposal for the 2028-2034 Multiannual Financial Framework extends the same milestone-and-target logic to the successor Cohesion Policy architecture. The next programming cycle therefore offers a concrete opportunity to specify network-cohesion indicators at the outset, where they can shape both allocation and closure assessment.
▸ At the municipal and metropolitan level, fragmentation diagnostics should inform project appraisal and investment sequencing. Project appraisal should give explicit weight to whether interventions close gaps, connect existing segments, and reinforce the main connected spine, and in already fragmented networks, investment should be sequenced toward consolidation before further outward expansion.
IEP Bocconi does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
