Official: Budapest Chain Bridge to stay car-free

Participants in “Budapest’s first residents’ meeting”, an online municipal survey, have expressed their preference for maintaining the current traffic rules on the city’s landmark Chain Bridge, allowing buses and taxis, as well as pedestrians and cyclists but no private cars, Gergely Karácsony, the city’s mayor, said on Tuesday.

Almost 80 percent of those answering the Town Hall’s questions agree that the bridge should stay one with “reduced traffic” and cars should not be allowed to return once the bridge’s renovation, now under way, is completed.

Karácsony said the city would have further talks with traffic organisations, but added that “Budapesters have made a clear decision, shared with city leaders: we don’t want to allow cars back onto the bridge,” he said.

Another survey: Budapest residents expect Karácsony to cooperate with government

Fully 95 percent of Budapest residents want the mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, to cooperate with the government, according to a Center for Fundamental Rights survey, while 92 percent expect him concentrate on local rather than national issues.

In less than a year’s time, municipal elections will be held in Hungary, and Budapest voters will also decide whether Karácsony, who has held office since 2019, will remain in his post, the think-tank noted in connection with its survey of 1,000 (0.05 percent of the capital’s population) Budapest adult residents published on Tuesday.

The think-tank commented that Karácsony’s term could not be qualified as “a success story”, noting that the mayor had nurtured ambitions to become prime minister in 2022, and had relied on deputy mayors and advisers appointed by Ferenc Gyurcsány to manage the city.

Budapest, it added, had been a battlefield ever since, and used by the opposition as a base of “resistance”.