2004-2014 TEN YEARS OF CHANGING IN THE PROJECT OF PASSENGER FERRIES ON ITALIAN LAKES, DUE TO THE 2006/87/CE AND CONSEQUENT RULES.

Due to the increasing requests for the passenger transportation on internal waterways, the size of the passenger ships operating on internal water has grown significatively, requiring a different approach by the Rules for construction. Some of the new criteria are quite different from the previous ones, especially for what concerns the damage stability, with more severe requirements about freeboard, weather criteria etc., and these criteria have impacted on the design, project, construction. Considering these elements, here the author studies the changes required by the new rules adopted after the publishing of the Law 2006/87/CE and the consequent new Rules for Inland water . The author examines the impact of those new requirements for stability, focusing on differences in height of the ship, transversal subdivision, position of safety appliances as rescue areas for shipwrecked people, etc. to evaluate the real effectiveness of the new rules and what has been the impact on new constructions. To perform this analysis with a real case study, the author considers 5 ships built between 2004 and 2014, and operating on the main Italian lakes, such as Lago di Garda, Lago Maggiore and Lago di Como. The length of the ships is between 41 and 49 m, and the passenger capacity is from 420 to 700 passengers, so the stability calculation, performed and realized for each type of ships, compares the possibility for the ships realized before the new rules, to match the new requirements, the impact of modifications in case of refitting and gives a personal advice about the tendency in the future.