No bike lanes for Nagykörút

Budapest Mayor István Tarlos with Hernádi Zsolt, president of Bubi's corporate sponsor, MOL oil company.

With time ticking away til the planned April 2014 launch of Bubi – Budapest’s public bike system -- the city is scrambling to make downtown fit for the scheme’s users. A recently announced plan calls for scores of bike-friendly measures covering nine central districts. However, the measures are all small, easy fixes, and, disappointingly, will not include the cycling movement’s biggest priority in recent years – bike lanes around the nagykörút.

The kerékágy blog quotes János László, president of the Hungarian Cyclists Club, which helped draft the work plan. László said that the nagykörút lanes would have caused serious conflicts, and that small improvements were simply easier to take up. A statement from the Budapest Transport Center (BKK) says nagykörút bike lanes are “not realistic in current traffic conditions".

The improvements in the plan would cover 120 streets, 60 signaled intersections and 30 segments of main arteries. They comprise inexpensive, relatively easy fixes such as the painting of lanes and chevrons on streets, installing signs indicating the presence of cyclists, and the creation of contraflow lanes on side streets to allow two-way bike traffic on one-way roads.

The plan also calls for expansion of car-restricted zones; installation of bike parking; and traffic calming measures.

The work would start in districts VI and VII so that the entire service area of Bubi – basically everything inside the nagykörút plus the Buda river bank – would be finished before Bubi’s launch. After that, work would continue in districts VIII, IX, XI, I, II, V and XIII.

But, as said, the big banana is off the table.

The nagykörút is the busiest street downtown, and already gets significant bike traffic -- about 1,000 cyclists per day or 6% of motor traffic. With cars frequently moving faster than the posted speed limit, and with no separated lane for cyclists, this creates a hazard.

This past summer, BKK commissioned a feasibility study on new bike facilities on the körút, and the proposed ideas ran the gamut from simple advisory lanes or sharrows (as on Margit híd) to the redesignation of the outside traffic lanes for cyclists only. But even before the ideas were presented for political debate, BKK staff said behind the scenes that bike lanes were a non-starter.

Sure enough, the city’s recent decision was negative. Kerékágy quoted BKK saying:

The possible solutions outlined in the nagykörút study, in which cycling infrastructure displaces an outer traffic lane or parking lane, are not realistic in the current traffic situation. This might be taken up after the introduction of a downtown congestion charge, but on this there’s been no final decision.

The city has postponed introduction of the congestion charge many times, even though it’s obliged to implement it as a condition of EU subsidies for the 4th metro project. But that’s an old story.

The question is whether the quick and easy measures done over the next five months will be adequate preparation for Bubi. The system will have more than 1,000 bikes and 74 stations, all concentrated downtown. One worry is that lack of a sufficiently safe and convenient cycling network will stymie the system’s success. The other is that many of the new users will be people inexperienced in riding in city traffic, and that they’ll be more vulnerable to road accidents.

But at present, the city’s political leaders have decided the prospect of inconveniencing car drivers is a bigger worry than risking death and injury of cyclists.

Congestion conundrum

If you're a parent, you've probably been in this situation: the kid is being a jerk, and you and spouse are going crazy. However, spouse has an all-day appointment or job to go to, and is decidedly less worked up than you. Actually, spouse doesn't seem to be bothered at all, but rather preoccupied with other, more pleasant matters. But just before she leaves, out of a misplaced sense of guilt, she goes nuclear on the kid: "Ok, if that's the way you want to be, you're grounded and you get no computer/iPhone/TV for the rest of the day!" Kid starts having a fit and, and, spouse, her parental duties properly disposed, breezes out the door.

You think, Thanks a million. Now I'm in charge of Class A, disruptive prisoner, and spouse has blown all my bargaining chips. This is going to be a long day.

This is the situation I was reminded of yesterday when Mayor Tarlos announced that Budapest would at last implement the congestion charge, and he would do it without delay -- at least not beyond 2015.

I've heard that Fidesz was grooming someone else for the top job at City Hall, and this all but confirmed it. If Tarlos says Budapest will have the congestion charge in 2015, that indicates Tarlos plans to be well out of office by then. Budapest is obliged to implement the charge because the former administration of Gabor Demszky promised to do it in order to get an EU subsidy for the Metro 4 project. 

Demszky handled that obligation just as Tarlos is now. By promising that it will be done, but sometime in the future, after several prerequisites are taken car of: opening of the new metro, creation of a peripheral park and ride infrastructure, the completion of the M0 motorway ring, and so in.

I grant that ideally all these thing should be done before congestion charging goes forward. However, I reckon that they could also be phased in over a longer timetable and that the sequence of steps isn't all that fixed. The only inviolable part of the timetable is for the mayor in question to complete his tenure and get out of harm's way before the charge comes into effect.   

Price of Procrastination

Hungary could lose EUR 640 million in EU funds for the metro 4 project if it continues to drag its feet on the congestion charge, according to a post this week on caboodle.hu.

According to the report, the Budapest Transport Centre (BKK) now states that it will be impossible to implement the charge until "the city's public transport network is completed". This would happen in 2015, if all goes as planned, and then the congestion charge could be implemented along with a system of peripheral park and rides, in 2016.

But how would the PT network be "completed"?? Isn't public transport a continual work in progress? A completion date strikes me as a phony benchmark, the latest pulled from bottomless barrel of excuses to delay the congestion charge.

Of course, the city leadership is terrified of alienating car owners and is desperate to find another way to tax themselves out of the metro 4 quagmire. A new "utilities tax" will hit landowners whose properties are crisscrossed by water and sewage mains and other infrastructure. Sounds like a soak-the-rich strategy, although everyone will feel the pain, from real estate tycoons on down to shop owners and flat tenants.

With congestion charging, at least you'd have a choice: drive downtown and pay or bike or walk and go for free. Or car pool and split the fee with your colleagues.

Or take BKV, which as of January 1 costs HUF 350 per ticket. That gets expensive, particularly if you have journeys that require a change of lines. Every change costs another HUF 350. This is the subject of another rant. But ... why should a public transport user have to pay an extortionate fee to use an environmentally friendly, space efficient means of travel while car users go for free over the same public roads?

Congestion charge flames out

Rush hour on Erzsebet Bridge.

So congestion charging in Budapest is dead -- again. Last Friday, Parliament took up a proposal that would have given municipalities (such as Budapest) the right to implement such a charge. The bill went down in a crushing 305-14 vote. The measure, proposed by the super-majority Fidesz party, garnered support from just two of its own MPs; the other supporters were from the left-leaning green party LMP. Even one of the two Fidesz representatives who submitted the bill voted against it.

Well, what did we expect? This idea, mooted and buried multiple times by former Free Democrat Mayor Gábor Demszky, was suddenly revived in January as City Hall groped for ideas to save its public transport  company, BKV, from going bankrupt. At first, City Hall released a trial balloon concerning an annual tax on car ownership, and after the predictable media outcry, the idea was dropped.

V District Mayor Antal Rogán, of Fidesz, voiced support for the idea of congestion charging, and somehow City Hall got on board. Mayor István Tarlós, who ran on the Fidesz ticket during his campaign but who has strained relations with the party leadership, walked a fine line on the issue. He stressed first and foremost that the idea was not his own, but one that he was forced to consider because his predecessor (Demszky) had promised it as a condition for getting EU funding for the Fourth Metro line. The proposal gained traction as a kind-of emergency fiscal measure along with proposals to further milk public transport users, including increased fares, application of VAT on ticket sales (already implemented) and reductions in social discounts.

My initial skepticism was based on the apparent rush with which it would be implemented. Congestion charging is an extremely controversial way to deal with traffic problems and invariably takes a lot of time and care to put in place. In Europe, although several cities have studied the idea and have attempted to bring it into force, just two, London and Stockholm, have implemented a proper congestion charge. A congestion charge is now being piloted in Milan, but only after several years experience with a less expansive eco-charging scheme.

Authorities here seemed clueless about what they were getting into. The suggested timetable for implementation was simply not realistic: City Hall said it would be up and running in a year's time, by July 2013. Never mind feasibility studies, never mind public consultation, never mind a system design, never mind public tenders for the necessary hardware and software.

Last month, I heard a presentation by David Vitezy, director of the city's umbrella transport coordinating center, BKK. He spoke about various transport schemes in Budapest, including the congestion charge. I asked him how BKK was going to manage political opposition to the idea. His answer amazed me: There was no political opposition, he said. The City Assembly and the leadership of virtually all of Budapest's district governments agreed congestion charging needed to be implemented, he said, adding that because the previous government obliged the city to implement it, everyone had political cover.

Granted, that was before the media started to take the idea seriously. In the ensuing few weeks, the idea started to unravel as the press ran one story after another about the charge's potential pitfalls. Streets on the perimeter of the cordon would be filled with parked cars, home values would go down in neighbourhoods outside the zone, drivers would find loopholes to avoid the charge. One article made the dubious argument that the charge would largely be state money circulating back into state coffers. Why? Because state offices account for a "good portion" of downtown workplaces.

A couple weeks ago, Mayor Tarlos looked to be back-tracking when he suggested, rather than having a congestion fee, there would just be a toll on the city's bridges. This would be easier to implement and, I suppose, more populist because it would target mainly Rozsadomb yuppies.

Funnily enough, there was very little forewarning in the press about the Parliamentary vote. The proposal was submitted by its fickle proponents just three weeks earlier and, like most legislation going through the single-party dominated body, it came to a vote with no public debate, despite its decisive consequence. I reckon it took nearly everyone by surprise except the MPs themselves. It definitely did me -- even though I knew that, as in other countries, there would have to be law modifications at the national level to enable the congestion charge. But in Hungary's case, there just wasn't any noise about this critical stage of the process.

One of the ironies is that it was pressure from the Fidesz government that drove City Hall to moot the idea in the first place. Congestion charging was part of the long-term fiscal stability plan that City Hall bashed together this spring in the wake of BKV's debt crisis. The government compelled the city to draft the plan as a condition for paying off BKV's loans. Now that the government has shot down a central pillar of the same plan, how can it maintain its tough stance on BKV subsidies?

As to where this leaves Budapest in light of the previous quid pro quo with the European Union, I have no idea. It's clear from media reports that city leaders are happy to wash their hands of it. The current administration "never insisted" on the congestion charge, according to a statement on the BKK website. City Hall is also arguing that the measure was premature and that if it ever does go forward, it should be preceded by strategic investments in park and rides and other transport infrastructure. That's precisely what Mayor Demszky said when he successfully put off congestion charging until he was well out of office.

Car Tax Dead but Congestion Charge Gets a Lift

A proposal to levy a flat monthly tax on Budapest car owners looked dead on arrival today. Budapest City Hall, grasping for a life line to pull BKV out of its financial quagmire, was considering a monthly tax of almost HUF 10,000 a month on car owners, which would raise an estimated HUF 32 billion per year. But the idea lasted about half a news cycle. Mayor Istvan Tarlos and just about everyone else denied having anything to do with introducing the proposal, and by Wednesday afternoon, the mayor was saying it was stillborn.

The encouraging news is that the idea of a congestion charge is still alive. Antal Rogan, mayor of District V and leader of the Fidesz faction in the City Assembly, pronouced that this would be would be a "more rational and reasonable solution."

I am in complete agreement. The reason a congestion charge would be better is because it would be levied only on drivers entering downtown. Car owners who don't come downtown or who come by another mode (public transport, foot, boat or bike) don't have to pay.

With congestion charges, the intent is to put a price on road use and thereby pressure some car owners to not drive downtown. The avoided traffic leads to reduced congestion, while the remaining traffic yields revenue that can be used to improve non-car mobility options (public transport, bike lanes and foot paths), which will lead to further reduction in car use. A virtuous cycle.

Congestion charges are very controversial because you're asking people to pay something that they currently get for free. However, the free-of-charge status quo does come with a price: travelers' time. It is partly because road use is free that they're so crowded. Putting a price on them will mean that those who don't really need to drive downtown will avoid the trip while those who do need to will be able to make the journey on less congested streets. This perspective prompted a New Zealand blogger to say that congestion charging should really be sold as a "congestion avoidance" scheme.

Some conservative bloggers have argued -- a bit disingenuously -- that such charges are unfair because they tax the poor so the rich can drive fast. But roadways are a valuable, limited resource and there's no reason why they should be free of charge to everyone at all times. And, in any case, a congestion charge can be implemented to include consideration for social fairness, including income-based discounts.

I imagine the flat, monthly tax seemed an attractive option to decision makers because it would be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement. A congestion charging scheme, by contrast, will involve a cordon of ANPR cameras that monitor every entry point into downtown along with enabling legislation at the national level and more. However, there's no sense in taxing every car owner regardless of their travel habits. I hope the city leadership can use the opportunity of the current crisis to push forward a sensible idea.