Don’t wait for the subway, build the tram system and Inner Ring Road – How to get from car-oriented to public-transport-city concept on streets of Belgrade

At the moment, Belgrade is setting aside record-high sums for public transport, but it seems that the state of this system and the traffic routes themselves has never been worse. Ring roads are being built in locations where they don’t belong, cars are allowed to use tram corridors and yellow road lines, so it’s no wonder that the new buses, which have been procured in record-high numbers, are trapped in traffic jams and gridlocks, instead of being able to stick to the schedule. Has Belgrade irretrievably shifted to the lane that leads to a car-oriented city or is there hope after all that, in the foreseeable future, it could revert to a much more humane, in traffic terms, public-transport city? Opinions, answers and solutions regarding this and other problems regarding the functioning of the traffic and public transport in Belgrade were provided by traffic experts and spatial planners at the panel organized by the Belgrade Can’t Wait (Beograd ne moze da ceka) initiative.

Nikola Jovanovic, the director of the Center for Local Self-Government and the moderator of the event, reminded that, for years, we had been listening about what’s wrong with the traffic and public transport in Belgrade, but that almost nobody offered concrete, quality solutions to those problems, making the gatherings such as that one necessary.

When it comes to concrete solutions, Dusan Milanovic, a traffic engineer who was the head of traffic at the Urban Planning Institute of Belgrade for a long time, pointed out that they existed, by that there was no magic solution that would quickly and efficiently improve the traffic situation in Belgrade.

– The traffic itself is not the purpose, it is a consequence of some urban transformations and urban events in the city. In Belgrade, with nearly a million and a half residents and 670,000 registered vehicles, where the rate of motorization is 400 vehicles to 1,000 residents, that is certainly a problem. Belgrade is being built, but the construction is not accompanied by the development of the traffic infrastructure relative to what is offered in the city when it comes to residential and office construction. It’s not a recent problem, the traffic is always pushed to the background. Unfortunately, it’s the way it is and then the city authorities regularly resort to saving whatever can be saved. My impression is that, in Belgrade, investments in traffic infrastructure are seen as an expense – emphasized Milanovic, who noted that he didn’t see a clear enough transportation policy in Belgrade.

– What are we striving for, in fact, creating a purely car-oriented city or a city in which public transport will be given advantage? Let me remind that, in the Belgrade development strategy, prepared not so long ago, as the main direction of that development, it is said that the city is oriented toward developing public transport, cycling and pedestrian traffic. However, in practice, nothing significant has been done about it, except for the expansion of the pedestrian zone – pointed out Milanovic and said that there was also a very confusing vision of the development of rail track systems, that there were efforts toward a subway system, and that the tram system was fully neglected.
– When you look at tram tracks and trams, they are like fortification obstacles, something’s clearly not working there. Trams are not used in the form and to the extent they should. Traffic regulation is a problem too, I think it has been brought down to a level where it is producing unfavorable results, such as the example of the mass construction of roundabouts. The one located near Usce, with the median strip, has 50 meters. When you look at the world norms, they say that, if the traffic volume is higher than 2,400-2,500 per peak hour, they are not suitable for application. And if you look at the numbers, although, to be honest, those from 2015, you can see that, at around 4 PM, there, near Usce, around 8,000 vehicles pass – Milanovic said and emphasized that, in Belgrade, the development of the street network had been neglected as well and that, of around 850 km of the primary street network, as much as 70% of the traffic routes have one lane per direction, and less than 10% have three or more lanes per direction.

– On such a network, you can’t expect much flow anyway. A single bus, in the Belgrade conditions, has 80 passengers, and the equivalent to that is 60 cars, because their occupancy rate is lower than 1.3 people. And then, when you put those 60 cars in one lane, it’s a row that stretches 300 meters. So, we obviously have a problem – Milanovic pointed out and added that one of the solutions to the traffic problems and jams in the city would be to complete the Inner Ring Road which would protect the central zone from all the traffic that doesn’t have that zone as the destination.

The traffic engineer Vladimir Depolo also believes that it is pretty difficult to quickly untangle the traffic Gordian knot that the city has gotten itself into. He believes that one of the main problems is that plenty of things that concern the traffic and public transport in Belgrade have been neglected for quite a long time.

– For quite a long time, we’ve had investor-based urban planning, which is not accompanied by the construction of adequate infrastructure. In addition to that, in Belgrade, we are also witnessing the ruination of the public transport system, which is not just a consequence of organizational problems, but also the fact that an enormous number of people have switched to using cars. That doesn’t seem entirely logical, because, since 2000, plenty has been done to improve the public transport system. When I managed the subway at the Belgrade Land Development Public Agency, we had very clear annual and medium-term plans of construction, which were an integral part of the development strategy of Belgrade. In order to resolve the problems of defining traffic priorities, some twenty years ago, we commissioned a traffic master plan so that, in the next twenty years or so, we would get a clear order of the moves that would be harmonized with investment-based urban planning. Because we had a clear picture of where the demand for construction was being concentrated and it was clear where there should be investments in traffic routes and waterworks and sewerage. It was pretty harmonized at the time, but then the pressure of investment-based urban planning pushed numerous traffic priorities to the back – Depolo reminded and estimated that one of the solutions to the traffic problems in the city was certainly the completion of the Inner Ring Road, but added that it would require a lot of time and money.

– An alternative to that would be to start the reconstruction of Patrijarha Pavla Street, but that should not have been built for longer than a year, and we are building it for five, six years, and to make matters worse, because of that, for years now, there is no tram line toward Knezevac, so the tram corridor has been ruined there as well – emphasized Depolo.

That Belgrade is not solving its problems on time when it comes to the planning of traffic priorities is also the opinion of the traffic engineer Gradimir Stefanovic.

– For a long time now, the priorities have been wrong here when it comes to the very important holy trinity of planning important projects. Because, the way things should be done is for the urban planner to begin, to point out what can be done and under what conditions, then the traffic and civil engineers realize that infrastructure that the urban planner envisioned, then the economist covers the finances, and then the politician is just there to formalize things, not run it all. I have a big problem with my colleagues who are not reacting against it – pointed out Stefanovic.

When it comes to the development of the tram network and this transport subsystem in Belgrade, he reminded that, 20 years before, a special work group had been formed for the modernization of trams in central and eastern Europe, but added that Serbia had, without a doubt, advanced the most slowly, that is, that it had not advanced at all.

– For example, Bucharest has turned line 41 into a rail line, accelerated it, improved its usage. Its corridor is a little longer, but it is like the one in Block 45. And what do we have there? You got on a tram and it successfully stops at every single intersection, although that street is a textbook example of giving priorities to trams. On top of all that, we don’t have adequate stands, or an adequate remote control of the substations. Also, when we talk about the tram subsystem, there’s also the holy trinity, which is infrastructure – rolling stock – control system. All those components have to be at an acceptable level, but in Belgrade, unfortunately, they are not – he noted and pointed out that there was room for the tram system to be further modernized and not affect the development of the subway system and added that the tram system should not be ignored just because we needed a subway.

– We are far from the public-transport-oriented-city concept. The stops are being pushed, stretched apart, so that things would be easier for passenger vehicles. Direct transfers at many points in the city has been disabled as well, which is how the public transport has been stabbed in the back – the traffic expert believes.

But, if one considers the sum that is currently set aside just for public transport in Belgrade, which is RSD 40 billion, that is, around a fourth of the city budget, someone from abroad could rightfully thinks that the people of Belgrade are overjoyed with their public transport, which in fact doesn’t match the facts, emphasized the traffic engineer Ivan Bankovic, who is also the president of the trade union Centar in the Belgrade public transport company GSP.

During the two-hour panel which, considering the subject, expectedly caused a lot of questions and additional constructive discussion, the traffic engineer Dragomir Lukic reminded of his positions that he had talked about several times regarding the problems and the badly planned dynamics of the construction of new bridges in Belgrade, primarily the new Sava bridge and the one on Ada Huja, whereas professor Vladimir Momcilovic, PhD, an associate professor at the Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering, pointed to the importance of the preparation of transport plans and other strategic and planning documents in that field.

– I would never make such important decisions without having a solid information basis, because when there is a functioning system, we can follow how it functions and then we can start the surveys that we sorely need. But, instead of that, we can see that we have solutions which are just pulled out of nowhere and decisions are made that will cost us in the long term. We don’t have to agree about every issue as experts in a certain field, what’s important is for us to reach a consensus – pointed out Momcilovic.

Dejan Aleksic

Saobraćajni fakultet Beograd

JUP Urbanistički zavod Beograda

JP Direkcija za građevinsko zemljište i izgradnju Beograda

Centar za lokalnu samoupravu Beograd

Faculty of Transport and Traffic Engineering Belgrade

Nikola Jovanović

Gradimir Stefanović

Dušan Milanović

Vladimir Depolo

Dragomir Lukić

Vladimir Momčilović

Ivan Banković

trade union Centar

public transport in Belgrade

traffic in Belgrade

roundabouts

Beograd ne moze da ceka initiative