ABSTRACT                                                        -> Italian Site

The object of the following work is the urban traffic during a working-day in Bologna.
The methodology used is the Life Cycle Assessment, able to analyse a product, a process, or a social problem (as traffic) with a scientific approach from "the cradle to the grave ".
At first this study describes the circulation conditions which characterises this city:
· amount of vehicles driving on urban roads;
· five different categories of means (car, motorcycles, delivery vans, trucks, buses);
· four different types of fuels (petrol used by car transport, by car transport with catalyser, gpl, diesel used by car, delivery van and trucks, compressed natural gas).
The method Eco-Indicator 99 has been modified to take into consideration costs caused by traffic and to evaluate them. Costs have been classified in two categories:
1) individual costs: they are costs paid for buying fossil fuels, maintenance, but also tickets paid by citizens to get on a bus.
2) social costs: they are costs due to buses, but also to the big number of accidents, to the time wasted by driving a car in a heavy urban traffic.
Secondly the study has introduced for every means of transport the amount and quality of materials for production, fuel consumption, emissions, number of accidents, costs generated by traffic.
The software (SIMA PRO 5) evaluates the results of pollutant emissions from urban traffic and costs.
The last part of this work shows how these results can be greatly improved thanks to several solutions , concerning fossil fuels and number of vehicles.
The work carries out, after a compare between two different scenarios of traffic, the big environmental and economic advantages that Bologna and its citizens can reach.