Mobility Week Programme Launched by Mayor Karácsony - Fewer Traffic Jams in Budapest?
- 16 Sep 2023 6:36 AM
- Hungary Matters
The message of European Mobility Week is that Budapest is not just made up of motorists, cyclists and public transport passengers, but also residents who want to get around, Gergely Karácsony, the city’s mayor, said on Friday, opening the environmental campaign in the capital.
The Budapest city council’s job is to offer Budapest residents sustainable means of transport, Karácsony told a press conference in City Hall Park.
The city has become less liveable in recent years, with more and more people moving outside its borders and driving in to work, putting a burden on the environment, he said.
“This negative spiral is what we’d like to reverse,” he said, adding that the city council’s aim was to add more pedestrian crossings and protected bicycle lanes while keeping public squares for residents.
Karácsony noted that the mobility week had started out as a single car-free day, but the city administration today “thinks about this issue in a far more complex way”.
Budapest’s leadership does not see the parts of the city as mere “transport vessels” between the workplace, school and the home, but rather as “the place where we live, and whose quality fundamentally impacts how we live”, he said.
Meanwhile, the mayor said the claim that the city was seeing a sudden surge in congestion was false, citing international statistics as showing that there were fewer traffic jams in the capital.
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