Prague congested as ever on European Day without Cars

Monday, September 22nd, is European Day without Cars. Several towns and cities around the Czech Republic have officially joined the event but the capital Prague so far has seemed just as congested as on any other day. Unimpressed by the attitude of the city authorities, several NGO's launched a project called "Auto-Mat" in the long run tries to offer alternatives to car transport in the city. Radio Prague spoke to Petr Stepanek of the civic association Oziveni which joined the "Auto-Mat" project and she asked him first to explain more about "Auto-Mat".

Prague congested as ever on European Day without Cars

Czech environment minister Libor Ambrozek, photo: CTK

"This means auto-mate like in a chess game, meaning to get cars out of the game. It is organised by a loose, unregistered group of artists, interested citizens and a few NGOs which give it some kind of legal background for purposes of registering and having space rented etc."

Many cities around the country have joined European Mobility Week, how did Prague participate in it?

"The city of Prague, unfortunately, did not fulfil the criteria of this week, one of which was to close a part of the city to car traffic for at least a day. Our politicians didn't have the guts to do that, not even for a couple of hours. So, technically, they were not part of European Mobility Week. Nevertheless, they prepared their own competition and a few bureaucrats and politicians, including Mayor Bem raced in the morning against cars. There were six trips over three days and public transit beat cars five times. One interesting thing came out of it: bicycles and motorcycles gained way over an hour and a half over cars and public transportation on those three days, which shows a fact known to many European cities like Copenhagen or Vienna or Amsterdam: that the bicycle is the single fastest mode of transportation within the city."

Today, Monday 22nd is European Day without Cars - has the city of Prague joined the event?

"What I know about the city of Prague is that they issued some free tickets and you can pick them up at the City Transport Authority and travel for free. I'm not aware of any wider or mass event or parts of the city being closed. So I would say that the response of the city is lukewarm rather than active."

So there are not fewer cars in the streets today...

"Unfortunately not. The city did not do any educational campaign, nor it closed parts of the city. It's a shame. There are Bohemian and Moravian towns that have participated for the past five or six years and they are much ahead of Prague. Given leading European politicians travelling on their bikes to their offices, Prague is rather an embarrassment."

How did you travel to work this morning?

"As every day, I took a bicycle."