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On Wednesday, Groningen city council approved plans to organize traffic differently in the city center in the years to come. The plan’s credo is that the car is no longer “central” in the city.
GroenLinks Alderman Philip Broeksma is delighted: “We’re going to think 180 degrees differently about interpreting public space,” he says.
Not just the connection route
“The car is no longer in front,” says Broeksma, “and we no longer see the street as a road connecting from A to B.”
Concretely, this means, among other things, that there is less space to park in the street. The speed limit will also be lowered to thirty kilometers per hour in many places. In addition, the plans put the tram back on the political agenda.
‘On top’
Not everyone in the opposition is equally happy with the new way of looking at downtown traffic at “180 degrees different”. VVD and CDA, for example, think Broeksma is blowing very high from the tower.
“Hasn’t the car been number one for years now?” Asks CDA city councilor Herman Pieter Ubbens, who calls Broeksma’s argument a “marketing discourse”. “We’re going to take it more extreme, but why does it have to be like this on top? ‘
Comparison with the traffic plan
The PvdA compares the plans with the famous traffic plan. This was written in the 1970s by the then aldermen Jacques Wallage and Max van den Berg.
“This plan was not adopted without criticism by city council, but we see the positive impact it has had on the city,” said party leader Julian Bushoff. He points out that the city has thus become car-free and that there are no more cars on the Vismarkt and the Grote Markt.
Besides the four coalition parties, the VVD, PvdD and Student & Stad also voted in favor of these plans. For now, this is a vision for the years to come: the new municipal councils will again vote on more concrete plans.
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