ANAS stronger after Armani's stint

(ANSA) - Rome, November 12 - ANAS CEO Gianni Vittorio Armani informed Transport and Infrastructure Minister Danilo Toninelli that he was quitting on November 7, following a change in the government's stance on the merger between railways company FS Italiane and ANAS.
    Armani also informed the FS Italiane group that he was leaving the highways agency. Armani arrived at ANAS in May 2015, following a spell with Terna Italia, and during his three years in charge he renovated in a radical way the company, which, with its 27,000-kilometre road-and-motorway network, is the biggest highway manager in Europe. For the first time in its history, ANAS prepared an articulated investment plan worth 33 billion euros which made planning over a five-year period (2016-2020) possible.
    This plan is heavily orientated towards maintenance interventions, which account for 46% of the investment funding.
    ANAS also adopted a new planned-maintenance programme model which, among other things, features a system of continual monitoring of bridges and viaducts (almost 40,000 inspections were carried out by ANAS technicians on 13,000 bridges/viaducts/overpasses under the agency's management in 2018 alone). A reorganization of the road network of national interest was launched under Armani's management too, with the transfer of several regional and provincial arterial roads (over 3,500km) to ANAS.
    Activities abroad have also registered a significant increase via participation in the AIE (ANAS International Enterprise), with, for example, the management of 400km of motorway network in Russia. The most-recently approved balance sheet, which refers to 2017, highlighted several important results, such as: - 2,500km of network asphalted/repaired (Piano #bastabuche - #nomoreholes plan); - 450 work sites active for extraordinary maintenance in 2017, for a value of 979 million euros (up 20% with respect to 2016); - 2.6 billion euros of tenders published (up 13%); - 2.3 billion euros of tenders assigned (up 50%); - 1.4 billion euros of contracts signed (twice the total for 2016); - over 100 companies awarded contracts for major works (over three times the total for 2016).
    Finally, work on the first Italian Smart Road, the A2 'Autostrada del Mediterraneo' (Mediterranean Motorway), started under Armani's management. This is a highly innovative project, one of the first of its kind in the world in the road sector and unique in terms of its span, which will make it possible, one one hand, to monitor the condition of the infrastructures and the surfaces with fixed and mobile sensors, and, on the other, to improve traffic management and highway safety as well as experiment with self-driving vehicles.