12.3.08

City of Luxembourg: Plan d'aménagement général (PAG)


Some personal (and humble) considerations about the PAG presented the 29th of February (you can find it here):

- it's very positive to finally acknowledge that the saturation of the Hamilius-Gare axis is one of the major problems concerning public transportation in the city; the solution is, of course, to create other bus-train(-tram?) interfaces, namely in Kircheberg, Gasperich and Howald (East, South and West; the Northern entrance to the city poses a different problem, as the highway is still under construction);

- it's good to know that, in a country where one of the most relevant yearly "cultural" activities is the Auto-Festival, someone is planning to reduce accessibilities for cars and promote public and soft transportation (at least it shows some nerve);

- sadly, there are no plans for closing the highway ring around the city: if you're in Strassen and want to go to the airport, it's faster to drive through town, and this is not a good sign;

- a second inner ring (with a speed limit around 70-80 km/h, where possible) would help distributing the traffic coming from the highway; this function is now taken by some of the radiating axes and, what's worst, by the streets surrounding the city centre, which is not good; this would be the right place to build P&Rs and the new bus-train(-tram?) interfaces;

- is it reasonable to expect that the city will continue to grow has in the last 10 years? What will happen if banking laws and TVA are imposed and harmonized through out Europe?

- promote the installation of families in the city is not has easy has to reduce traffic or paint new bicycle lanes: people will have to be convinced that they are allowed to be part of the city, and that they can have a life outside the "oxygen bubbles" provided by the proximity of their countries of origin (for the frontaliers) or by the institutional/social support from their employers (for the European civil servants); for to really establish themselves in real Luxembourg, people need to know that they will be able to send their children to a good school, and to have European quality health care (not just cheap), and that they can go to a supermarket or shop other than Auchan and get a good friendly service even if they can only communicate using the second official language of the country. Of course this has nothing to do with traffic, but the population issue is (well) included in this "Plan d'aménagement général";

- only recently I was aware of the existence of (another) controversy about the demolition of Luxexpo to liberate some space for the tramway. I can only have one opinion about this: implode the damn thing!

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