Bucharest mayor announces parking strategy to clear city's right-hand lanes of tens of thousands of cars

The Bucharest municipality will take measures to clear the streets' lane one of the tens of thousands of parked cars, the Capital City's General Mayor Nicusor Dan told a debate today on sustainable transport in Romania, agerpres reports.

The mayor explained that the construction of new bike lanes will be possible only after the implementation of the parking strategy.

"For this we must free the city from parked cars and this comes through the parking strategy. So, the parking strategy first, then the bike lanes," Nicusor Dan said.

According to the mayor, Bucharest only has 15 - 20 kilometers of bicycle lanes fitted according to standards.

"(...) Even if we wanted to build bike lanes now, we wouldn't have where to do it because of the cars parked everywhere on the right-hand lane so that the first thing is to find, through the parking strategy, alternative solutions in order to move the cars off lane one and get some considerable space. It is useless to have a bike lane that is not connected to others," he said.

In the mayor's opinion, only a part of the routes established through the plans for the construction of bicycle lanes with funding from the Environment Ministry are useful, and he suggested for instance a broader track linking the Grozavesti quarter to the United Nations Square, which should carry both public transport and bicycles.

Nicusor Dan also termed the former administration's bike-buying voucher program as useless. "In absence of bike lanes, what's the point of giving vouchers to people to buy bikes?," the mayor inquired.