Post date: Sep 28, 2015 4:47:3 PM
According to some estimates, over 20 million people visit the city of Venice every year. Because of this, it puts a heavy strain on the transportation industry, which is mainly by boat. On Venipedia, they have a dashboard that keeps track of how many people that are coming in and out of the city on any given day. When I looked at it over the weekend, they had about 80,000 tourists coming into the city. Around 19,000 of them were over nighters and another 63,000 were day trippers. This is a lot of people in one city at any given time. The amount of wake produced during the weekends would be a lot greater. When I'm looking at the dashboard today, there have only been about 40,000 incoming tourists with 18,000 over nighters and 28,000 day trippers. I checked both values at the same time of day, Sunday vs Monday.
The amount of tourists in the city is expected to grow linearly in the next several years; however, the amount of permanent residents is expected to continuously decline. The tourists can outnumber the residents on any given day, with only about 60,000 living in the city currently. The question now becomes whether or not the city can withstand an increase in tourism, seeing as the canal walls are already eroding and sea levels are rising. Venice cannot incorporate more boat traffic because the canals will become too congested and the city will decline even more rapidly.
-Jacqueline