Upper twinning city Budapest to reduce cars dominance
UPPER twinning city Budapest has planned and tested car-free initiatives for several years, with its most recent iteration during the 2023 EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK - a car-free weekend counting over 10,000 participants and a car-free day - emerging as a resounding success. Alongside other promotional activities and the implementation of mobility measures, the city’s ambition to open the lower Pest embankment to pedestrians and cyclists permanently caught the attention of the EUROPEANMOBILITYWEEK Award jury, resulting in the city’s award win.
Finally for almost a whole month, the Lower Wharf in Pest will be open to those who want to relax and exercise: from July 26 to August 15, those traveling on foot and with micro-mobility devices such as bicycles or scooters can use the Jane Haining Wharf in a car-free environment between Eötvös tér and Irányi utca near the Erzsébet bridge. Budapest is one of a growing number of cities permanently opening areas of their city center to pedestrians and cyclists, in addition to organizing expansive car-free days and/or weekends.
Since 2020, for various periods, the lower embankment in downtown Budapest (the Pest side of the Danube River) has been closed from motorized traffic and opened for active and micromobility users. In the beginning, the closure applied only for weekends from May to September, then, from 2023, the period was extended from March to October, while the whole embankment got closed for a month (24/7) to provide people with more liveable urban space to enjoy the summertime.
In 2023, UPPER project partner BKK Centre for Budapest Transport (the transport manager of the city of Budapest) performed comprehensive data collection to examine the effects of the embankment closure on the diverted motorized road traffic, while also monitoring the number of visitors arriving by micro-mobility devices or on foot. BKK was taking a look at those who were given back the freedom to use the public space of the road in its entire width: monitoring the number of users and the ways they were using the space.
BKK collected road traffic data from nearly 30 locations, using data from more than 80 counter devices. For the monitoring of the embankment visitors, the data analyst team processed 100 hours of recorded video material and examined the patterns of use of shared bikes at 14 nearby locations.
Depending on the weather, BKK measured 25-34,000 passers-by on the central section of the embankment during weekends. Despite the closure, the diverted road traffic did not increase significantly the traffic volume in the area (only by approx. 3-10 percent). Based on the bicycle counters, the area's cycle traffic was increased by 15 percent during the measured period.
Click here to learn more
@photo credit BKK
