Close to 90,000 people work in the bars and restaurants of Milan and the area around it, according to the Milan association of bars and restaurants. I see it with the young people who work for me. At the end of the shift, while the kitchen is being closed and the tables put back, they keep looking at the clock, because they have to run for the last metro. Others, so as not to chase it every night, live four to a flat in Milan, because rents here are high. Outside the city they would find a more decent home. But after the shift they would have no way of getting back to it.

In Milan the last metro leaves at around half past midnight. On a Tuesday as on a Saturday: on the M1 timetable in force since the end of August, the three columns, weekdays, Saturdays and holidays, all end just after midnight. After that there are night buses that follow the metro routes, and about ten more lines that run only at weekends.

In Madrid the metro closes at half past one every day. In Munich, since January 2025, the U-Bahn no longer stops on weekend nights: in the centre a train comes every fifteen minutes.

Milan itself has shown it can be done. During the Olympics, in February, the metro stayed open until two on every line. In its report on 2025 the transport company writes that it has set up “working groups” to reach two o’clock afterwards as well. There is no date.

Out because it costs

The timetable matters more once you look at where the people who work in Milan live. According to idealista, in September renting in the city cost on average 22.4 euros per square metre per month. In Rho 12.9, in Cologno Monzese 12.6, in Pioltello 16.9. For a sixty-square-metre two-room flat that means about 1,340 euros a month in Milan and 770 in Rho: almost six hundred euros of difference, almost seven thousand a year.

Those who can’t manage move out. In 2024, 38,300 people left Milan for another Italian municipality. Ten years earlier it was 24,600. For many of them it is not a lifestyle choice: their pay simply isn’t enough.

Then there is the car. According to Isfort, using Istat and ACI data, in 2023 a household spent on average 334 euros a month on its car, 14.5 per cent more than in 2020. And young people are taking up driving less and less: among 25 to 29 year olds, 84.9 per cent had a licence in 2014, ten years later 77.4. Some chose it, many cannot afford it.

Put together, the two things make the problem. Rent pushes you out of Milan, and the cost of a car takes away the means of getting back. The saving in Rho only holds if there is a train: the annual pass that reaches the sixth fare zone costs 682 euros, 512 for young people. If the train runs every half hour and the last one leaves early, the advantage disappears. And those who moved out to save money buy a car again, or give up their job in the city.

The trains we already have

Outside the city boundary the service is weaker. Every morning thousands of people come into Milan from the towns of the metropolitan area and Brianza, and more than half of them, according to surveys by the city’s mobility agency, come by car. Only one in four uses public transport.

And yet the tracks are there. There are twelve suburban lines, the S lines, and almost all of them have a train every half hour. According to Trenord, 384,000 people use them on weekdays. The Munich S-Bahn, which does the same job with eight lines, carries 840,000, more than twice as many.

Half an hour is the interval that decides whether you take the train or not. With a train every fifteen minutes you go to the station without checking the timetable. With one every thirty, if you miss it you are late for work, and next time you take the car.

The train helps those who don’t take it

This is the point that usually gets lost, because trains are talked about as an environmental issue. They are also a work issue, and above all they concern the people who cannot take the train.

The plumber going from one customer to the next with his toolbox does not get on the S5. The electrician has a van full of cables, the supplier has to deliver by ten. According to the city’s mobility agency, 37,000 commercial vehicles enter the city on an average weekday. Between seven and eleven in the morning they are almost a quarter of the vehicles on the road. For them every car fewer is time gained: one more job a day, a delivery that arrives when it is needed.

Who hasn’t waited for a tradesman or a technician running late because of the traffic? In restaurants it happens every week: an oven that won’t work, a fridge that won’t cool, and meanwhile the evening service waits.

Every commuter who leaves the car at home and takes the train clears the road for those who have no choice but to use it. A train every quarter of an hour on the line to Varese is a policy for the tradesmen of Varese, even if they never get on a train.

Who decides

So why don’t the trains run more often? The most honest answer is that in Milan too many people decide on mobility, each for one piece of it.

The metro, trams and buses in the city are decided by the municipality, through a contract with the transport company that came out of a tender in 2010 and has been extended several times since. The latest extension runs out on 31 December this year. Out-of-town buses are planned by an agency in which the Metropolitan City, the body that by law should handle mobility for the whole area, owns 4.29 per cent. Less than Monza. The suburban trains are decided by the Region. Metro lines that cross the city boundary are paid for by the State and the Region and signed off by the City of Milan: the agreement for the M5 to Monza is signed by the Ministry, the Region and Palazzo Marino.

And when the money isn’t enough, it gets moved. In December 2025 the city asked to use for the M5 to Monza 406 million euros that had been meant for the M4 to Segrate, and the Ministry agreed in June. Finishing one project before opening another can be the right choice. But the people of Segrate do not vote for the mayor who asked for it.

In Munich all of this has been held together for fifty years by a single consortium, the MVV. The Land, the city and the surrounding districts are all in it, it serves more than four million people, and it has a single ticket for trains, metro, trams and buses. The suburban trains are put out to tender by the Land, which has just opened the tender for trains from 2034 to 2041, eight years in advance. Milan has had an integrated ticket since 2019, and it was a real step forward. But who decides how many trains run is as divided as it was before.

The method

Then there is the way we buy our trains. The contract between the Region and Trenord, signed in November 2023, is worth on average 536 million euros a year until 2033 and was awarded without a tender. It was legal: European rules allowed it until the end of December that year, and the contract was signed twenty-six days before. As early as 2021 the Transport Regulation Authority had written that the choice of a single lot, tied to the direct award, had “ruled out any assessment” of lots put out to tender.

The problem is the method, whoever uses it. A public service awarded without competition costs more and improves more slowly, because nobody is there offering to do better for the same price. In Germany regional lines have been put out to tender for thirty years. In 2015, in Stuttgart, the bids halved the public subsidy for every train kilometre compared with the old contract with the state railways.

Tenders are not a magic formula. One of the Stuttgart winners got into trouble in 2021: it could no longer run the trains at the price it had offered. The Land had one of its own companies take them over, paid the difference and is putting the lines out to tender again. Commuters were not left stranded for a single day. A well-designed tender provides for this too: if the winner gets it wrong, the service carries on and the trains stay in public hands.

Where to start

There are four proposals, and none of them has to wait for constitutional reform.

The first is more trains now. The Trenord contract already provides for up to 25 per cent more train kilometres by 2033. They should go first to the S lines, to reach a train every quarter of an hour at the times when people go to work and come home.

The second is the night. A metro running until two on Fridays and Saturdays could start tomorrow, because we already did it in February. Then all night at weekends, as in Munich.

The third is the method. The metro contract expires at the end of the year: hold a tender instead of yet another extension. And prepare the 2033 train tender now, split into lots, with publicly owned trains, so that whoever wins can use them and nobody starts with an advantage.

The fourth is who decides. A single authority for mobility across the whole area, trains included, in the hands of a metropolitan mayor whom the residents of the 133 municipalities can finally vote for. In August we wrote that the law to do it already exists and all that is missing is the will to use it. Today the most concrete reason to do it is the 7.10 train.

Politics should put its energy into the everyday problems of people who work. Instead, on the right as on the left, the hunt for a few votes pushes towards identity issues, which divide people and often cannot even be solved.

Anyone who wants to build an alternative for Milan could start here: with trains every half hour, with a metro that closes at half past midnight, with tenders that are never held. Flag-waving battles may bring a few votes to those who fight them, but they do not win elections for a coalition. In Milan you win by looking after the people already queuing on the ring road at six in the morning, and the ones running for the last metro at one at night.