Budapest to begin testing new road safety measures

Budapest will begin testing new measures aimed at reducing speed limits and traffic after the city assembly approved a proposal for a comprehensive road safety plan, Gergely Karácsony, the city’s mayor, said on Thursday.

Addressing an online press conference, Karácsony said there was broad social and political consensus on the need to significantly reduce the number of road accidents in Budapest.

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Citing an ongoing political debate on the proposal, Karácsony said it was clear that “nobody read” the document.

The proposal, he said, was nothing more than a call for the city’s leadership to submit a comprehensive road safety and traffic management plan to the city assembly and to launch test projects.

He said press reports that the city council was pushing for a blanket speed-limit reduction were untrue. The plans must be discussed with the district mayors so that it could become clear which areas of Budapest were overburdened with traffic, Karácsony said.

He said the city leadership had originally planned to address the need for traffic management around this time irrespective of the novel coronavirus epidemic, adding that the epidemic had only confirmed the need for cooperation on the matter.

Karácsony said the epidemic was likely to have both short- and long-term effects on transport in the capital.

He said the Budapest leadership had also incorporated the opposition Fidesz group’s amendment proposals on the need for social dialogue into the plan.

The city council has agreed with several districts on launching the test projects, the mayor said, adding that a comprehensive traffic management strategy would be prepared for the whole of Budapest by Dec. 31.

Source: MTI