Traffic in Budapest to be changed immensely: watch out for these modifications

As we have reported before, strict speed limits are expected to be implemented in Budapest. The reason is the too many deaths that occur on the streets of the Hungarian capital. The Municipality of Budapest wants to halve the number of road fatalities in the city by 2030 and reduce them to zero by 2050.

Road safety strategy in Budapest

The capital has developed a road safety strategy. The main points of this strategy are the regulation of the maximum speed limit on the different roads of Budapest. On average, one person has died every week on the roads of the capital over the past decade. For this reason, the Municipality of Budapest wants to halve the number of road fatalities in Budapest by 2030 and reduce them to zero by 2050.

The road safety strategy of the capital’s municipality shows that speeding is one of the main causes of accidents, Samu Balogh, the mayor’s chief of staff, told InfoRádió. He added that if a pedestrian collision occurs at 30 kilometres per hour, nine out of ten victims survive. Meanwhile, if it happens at 60-70 kilometres per hour, the ratio is reversed: the survival rate is up to 20 percent.

Read also: Strict speed limits to be implemented in Budapest

Strict speed limits

An important part of the road safety strategy is to review speed limits where necessary and reduce them where necessary, said Mr Balogh. As part of this, they want to double the area of protected residential areas (residential and side streets) where speed limits of between 20 and 30 km/h are in place.

speed limits budapest road safety strategy

The planned speed limits in Budapest. Source: Prt Sc from the video of RTL Híradó.

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The plans include the following speed limits:

Hungária Boulevard: 70 km/h
Beyond Hungária Boulevard: 50 km/h
Grand Boulevard (Nagykörút) and beyond: 40 km/h
Side streets: 30 km/h

Balogh added that it is important that this is accompanied by monitoring.

The municipality also intends to continue its pedestrian crossing renewal programme. Under this initiative, around half of the 5,240 pedestrian crossings in Budapest have been renewed in the last 3 years. We wrote about this earlier here.