On Sunday, Romans will vote in a referendum to address a failing transport system that lags behind virtually all European capitals

The images were dramatic: a packed escalator giving way, hurtling dozens of passengers violently downward at Rome’s Repubblica metro station.

To many of the city’s residents, however, the 23 October accident was hardly shocking. The explosion of a bus in May on the central shopping street Via del Tritone was no less than the 10th bus to blow up in Rome this year. And although there were no reported injuries, there were 22 bus blasts last year and 14 in 2016, most of which were blamed on short circuits.

Things are no better with the payment system. The few ticket machines that can be found do not take card payments and regularly swallow coins. The contactless, rechargeable cards that were promised earlier this year are still only being trialled in a few locations. Despite the drop in transit quality, costs are climbing: according to Andrea Giuricin, professor of transport management at Milan’s Bicocca University, Rome spends €7.4 per kilometre of transit travel – compared to the €2.8 that is considered European best practice.

On Sunday, however, Romans will be given the chance to have a say on their transit. A city-wide referendum will ask voters a peculiarly bureaucratic question: whether transport provision should be put out to public tender.

The current transport model has failed. It has created a disaster and everybody can see this Riccardo Magi, MP

Rome’s transit system lags behind virtually all European capitals, and plenty of Italian urban centres, too. Almost entirely based on two metro lines, A and B , with a somewhat disjointed C line, Rome’s metro only serves a fraction of the city’s 2.8 million residents. The council-owned Rome Transport Company (Atac) carries a huge €1.4bn debt and a reputation for waste.

The Yes campaign, using the tagline Mobilise Rome, argues that transit should be prised from city ownership and put through a transparent, open bidding process. The campaign has adopted the #BastAtac (Stop Atac) hashtag on social media and is making much use of exploding bus imagery online.

Riccardo Magi, MP for the Italian Radicals, leads the campaign. “The current transport model has failed,” he says. “It has created a disaster and everybody can see this.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bus is engulfed by flames in via del Tritone, central Rome, May 2018. Photograph: Claudio Peri/EPA

On the No side, however, is a prominent figure: the mayor, Virginia Raggi, who supports the state-run system. “Atac is the jewel in the crown of Rome,” she said during her election campaign in 2016, comments that would likely draw laughs if she made them today.

But Atac’s more than 11,000 drivers and operators largely support her, says Magi, pointing out that many Atac representatives also have elected positions within the council chambers – a clear conflict of interest, in his opinion. “Atac never respects its service agreement with the city council,” he says, “because it knows it doesn’t have to.”

Francesco Di Giovanni runs the No campaign, called Mejo De Nol (Roman dialect for “No is better”). At a press conference this week, he tried to laugh off the idea that Atac itself is mobilised behind the No campaign. “It is ridiculous to claim that all Atac employees vote in the same way,” he said, although he himself acts as a representative for non-unionised Atac staff.

Rome has an urban composition that is extremely difficult for public transport Paolo Arsena

The No campaign focuses on the potential cuts to services that open bidding could bring, and argues for the benefits of keeping transportation under the city’s control. “Every city is unique,” says Di Giovanni; the No campaign website emphasises what it calls the “extraordinariness of Rome”.

With layers of ancient and modern, the city is certainly unique. The city faces clear archaeological challenges, says Paolo Arsena, an architect who founded Metrovia in 2016 to propose a radical change to the metro network. Ancient ruins are only part of the problem, too.

“Rome has an urban composition that is extremely difficult for public transport,” Arsena explains. The metropolitan area is spread out, dense in parts and sprawling in others. With so many kilometres required to serve relatively few people, the city relies on motorised transport. “We are now the prisoners of Rome’s buses.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rome’s metropolitan area is spread out, making the city reliant on motorised transport. Photograph: Tony Gentile/Reuters

At Metrovia’s first conference, on 3 November, roughly 100 people were shown plans for a future Rome boasting 10 metro lines. The plan proposes to integrate existing regional railways that traverse the city, creating a system “fit for a European capital”, Arsena told the crowd.

Romans themselves, however, remain largely ambivalent, leading some critics to accuse the mayor of deliberating underplaying the referendum in order to preserve the status quo. Unusually, Raggi set a quorum of 33% voter turnout, which the Yes campaign says is an attempt to nullify a possible negative result. “It is clear that Raggi wants to say: ‘Look, nobody voted because nobody is interested and therefore the people are happy with our administration’,” says the Yes campaign’s Magi.

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Adding to the public confusion is a fake Raggi who has made several public appearances that have gone viral, in which she claims to deny that the vote is even taking place – the work of Giulia Maulucci, an actor and political satirist.

But the satire is hardly more biting than the reality. “Rome has been managed very badly for years, with mayors who lack vision,” Arsena says. “And this is a city that desperately needs vision.”

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