Having visited Venice (Italy) a few years ago, and having watched a few videos about it…it’s a city of canals and car-free streets. You walk, or take a boat to get from one place to another.
Can emergency vehicles use the streets? How about deliveries - are they limited to the canals?
As I recall, the “streets” won’t work even if they allowed it. I recall seeing an ambulance that was a boat, as well as a DHL delivery boat.
Most of the streets are very narrow and there are lots of stairs. There are handcarts and a few places where bicycles could go. I don’t recall seeing much in the way of motorized vehicles on land. Some of the passages are so narrow that they’re barely wide enough for two people to pass each other.
The emergency vehicles are boats.
There’s a road and rail bridge from Mestre to the eastern end of Venice, where there’s vehicular access to the ferry and shipping terminal; also a bus station and parking garages. You can’t go any further into Venice on a road vehicle - even bicycles are forbidden, I think. Goods are transported by boat and thereafter by handcart or hand trolley. Electric mobility scooters for the disabled are permitted, but in fact there are very few to be seen; they’re not a lot of use because they can’t cope with steps, and you don’t go very far in Venice without needing to go up or down steps.
There may be few utility vehicles used by the local authority for street sweeping, etc, at the western end. But in the city centre street cleaning is done with brooms and handcarts.
Like this;
Yup.
That radar is stupid low and will blast not only the medics but the patient and any passersby. But then I remembered the low bridges. I think it must pivot up when they’re out in open waters.
I doubt they need the radar in the canals, only out in the lagoon.
There have been vehicles in Venice:
Everything goes by handcart from the nearest canal. It’s a fantastic city - for the 17th century. Not only are all the picturesque bridges made with steps (so they get high enough to allow gondolas to go underneath) most bridges are only a few feet wide, and probably never built strong enough to hold anything resembling a large automobile. As others mention, many of the “streets” are simply alleyways and the wider ones are probably narrowed by shop displays sitting out front on the sidewalk (or rather, middlewalk? Wholewalk?) Besides, nobody is that far from a canal loading point.
it’s not much different than wheeling someone on a gurney from their apartment to the driveway in some big city buildings.
Even in the good old days, they did not use horses or carriages, so the city never adapted to them. (Mainly because until Napoleon arrived, and by 1800 canon had become able to reach the city from the mainland - there was no land connection; so what good is a carriage if you have to load it onto a barge to go anywhere beyond what would be walking distance anyway? Apparently the traditional (cliché?) sedan chairs were more practical for the hard-of-walking. Plus, the well off had their own fancy-schmancy private gondolas. Many of the great mansions are on the main canals and have their own dock and water gate door.
Venice was in a shallow lagoon, until Napoleon’s time out of canon shot. Immune from naval invasion because if necessary, the Venetians would pull up the channel markers and invaders’ large ships would run aground and be sitting ducks.
The causeway was built after that time when there was no point to stopping traffic. But by then, it was still simply to allow trains to come to the station, and now there’s a parking garage beside the station, IIRC.
Everybody should visit Venice once (or more) in their lifetime.
There was a TV series called Venice 24/7, which showed a lot of this, including fire boats.
I see it’s available on Dailymotion:
In his classic and highly recommendable book The City in History, urban architect and historian Lewis Mumford makes the point that Venice actually had, conceptually, a very modern transportation system. It superimposes two separate networks on each other, one vehicular (the canals) and one pedestrian (the alleyways), both of them extending throughout the city with each of them serving a specialised need but lots of interchange points between them.
^^^ This is very true. Venice is pretty easy to get around in. It’s relatively small, as cities go, and as long as you’ve got pocket change to get across the grand canal as needed, you can travel from point to point pretty quickly. Street vehicles are basically unnecessary.
I was there in early spring 2019 (just before the pandemic hammer fell!) and I can confirm everything else discussed above. I will add a couple of further points to elaborate and illustrate.
It’s certainly true that firefighting is done from the canals using specialized pumper boats. This is obviously more difficult, and it leads to some stringent fire-code restrictions, because they want to minimize potential incidents and risk as much as possible. This is why Italians will tell you not to bother with pizza in Venice — pizza restaurants are not allowed to use the high-temperature ovens that produce the classic crisp crust. Instead, they make pizza in lower-temperature electric ovens, with a bready crust that most Italians turn their noses up at. The tradeoff in terms of fire risk is deemed acceptable, and besides, Venice has many other much-better food options. It’s available, but it’s just for the tourists who don’t know what else to eat.
During my visit, it struck me that I was not seeing any public wastecans on any of the “streets,” like you’d expect in any other city. As you walk around, you have nowhere to drop your coffee cup, or your takeaway wrapper. I asked a local about it, and the practice is to go into a business, a shop or a hotel, and ask to dispose of your trash. The reason? It’s logistically prohibitive to collect garbage from normal public receptacles, because the workers would need to use the ubiquitous handcarts to trundle down the narrow lanes, going from can to can. The many delivery carts are already disruptive enough; they don’t need more traffic. All of the businesses have a rear entrance that faces the canal behind, and that’s how their trash pickup is handled, via specialized garbage boats. And therefore it’s more practical to funnel public rubbish for collection that way.
Finally, it’s important to understand that Venice is not really a functional modern city in the conventional sense. It sees millions of visitors every year, but the permanent local population is only around 250k, according to a gondola operator we had lunch with. The vast majority of these are dedicated to serving those visitors, directly or indirectly. They therefore don’t need to commute, and many of them don’t own cars. The ones who do have a vehicle will keep it stored on the mainland; when they need to drive somewhere else in Italy, they take a train or bus out of Venice to where the car is parked. It’s not typical for someone to live in Venice proper and travel to a mainland job every day.
As a final note, I will confirm what @md-2000 said: Venice is a must-visit. It’s breathtaking, awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping. I spent the whole week in something like a dreamlike haze, frequently unable to fully process where I was and what I was looking at. It’s a truly astonishing place, and I would go back in a heartbeat.
I’ve been to Venice repeatedly myself, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, but for the sake of fairness I think it should be said that it’s one thing to enjoy its uniqueness as a tourist, another to live there permanently, day in and day out. Overaging of the population is a serious issue in Venice; many young people who grew up there move away. Part of the reason is, of course, the level of prices that the neverending influx and presence of tourists brings about, but the inconvenience of being there is another important factor. As with many other tourist destinations, it’s nice to be there but you still want a return ticket in your bag.
Yes, that’s a good point, and completely fair. If you really open yourself to the city, you will perceive a certain empty weariness, both in the places and the people. As a location, it’s essentially a historical novelty, bordering on a theme park; it’s not a healthy place for someone to just live.
This speaks to my biases as a traveler, but — if you go as a tourist and you just want to ride the gondolas and buy some fancy glass, the locals will put on a polite face for you, and you’ll have an enjoyable time.
But me, I really like to be in a place, getting off the common track, meeting and talking to people about themselves and their relationship to the location. In Venice, when I did this, I was surprised to discover a barely-concealed undercurrent of deep sadness. The locals are very proud of the city’s beauty and historical importance, but are simultaneously extremely aware that Venice’s days as a sparkling jewel are over and it’s now well on the way to irreversible decay. But when I politely persisted in my curiosity, most of them perked back up, because they recognized my genuine interest and wanted to tell me their personal stories, and the stories of the city.
Example: I was near the Rialto bridge, buying some gelato for my kids. There was a guy hanging out, making chitchat with the woman behind the counter. He heard me speaking English, and asked me how I was enjoying the city, in a friendly but perfunctory tone. I said it was beautiful, there are amazing things to see everywhere, but it seems like you really have to look in the nooks and crannies to see the really interesting stuff. I mentioned how, earlier that morning, we had passed a building under renovation, with its doors wide open, and inside, the tilework in the vestibule was spectacular. It was just another building, not a destination, but there had to be a story behind it. He grinned, and said, Let me show you something. He walked with us for a couple of blocks, to a piazza with a church at one end. He pointed up at the gold clock mounted on the church: Everybody who comes to Venice wants to see the big blue block, it’s the famous clock, but this clock, this is the oldest clock in Venice, on the oldest church in Venice. He pointed out the unusual 24-hour design, and told us a crazy story about how it never worked right, how it’s never had the correct time, not in 500 years.
Venice may be a badly-faded gem, but you can still pry into the crevices and see its former glory.
This is getting off track for FQ, but when someplace makes a powerful impression on me, I find it hard not to babble on about it.
Yes…
It took us a bit of work one day to find the “Ca’” we were looking for, I don’t recall the name - it had the same name as a house along the grand canal, so we were confused for a while. The house was still set up as a typical merchant’s home, with the warehouse area on the ground floor where it was accessible to the canal for transport, and the moderately opulent residence in the floors above.
From the publicity materials, it was a good example of the fate of Venice. The last inhabitant was an elderly lady still living a life plucked almost directly from the previous century. She did nothing with the place, so it kept its historical charm and original look. When she died, it soon became more of a museum piece. This seems to have been the fate of Venice over the last few centuries - the very attributes that made it great at the time were what made it a charming backwater of industrial life. The main problem Venice had been experiencing in the last century - sinking - was due to industry across the lagoon on the mainland sucking groundwater out and contributing to the city’s slow subsidence.
But this goes for almost all of Europe, and other places in the world. You can’t fake history, Las Vegas notwithstanding. This stuff was built over a millennia or two, and to those of us where something from the late 1800’s are “old” in our area of the world, it is amazing.
But, but…What about Captain Nemo’s car?
Well, maybe for the young & healthy. But if you’re in a wheelchair or use a cane or walker, it’s almost impossible.
Clearly, no ADA considerations in this city!
I did mention a sedan chair as an option… 
I finally got around to looking at Youtube videos of Venice ambulances and fireboats. They go much faster than any other boats - thus creating quite a wake. The smart gondoliers can be seen turning their boats at a 90 degree angle to the shore when one of these “speedboats” passed by - to avoid (or at least lessen) the chance of being swamped by a wake/wave. One UPS boat almost lost a few packages to the canal’s waters.