City planning as cabaret in Budapest
City planning in Budapest has always been a bit of a comedy act. Few decades ago the council started building the second (red) metro line. The National Theatre, that time, the jewel of Blaha, was found to be in its way, so they blew it up. Few months later they realised the metro would not have even touched the buildings foundation. Some say that the commies wanted to destroy that national symbol on purpose.
In the 70’s, they were building a motorway bridge near Nyugati. They started from both sides, and as the two branches were nearing each other they realised there was a 0,675 meter difference between the two. One side was measured to the Adriatic Sea level, the other is to the Baltic, hence the divergence. Well, there has always been a big matter which standard the country is measured or compared to.
People on night buses saluted this masterpiece of planning for decades. Coming from the South on Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, the bus turned left on Alkotmány just before the bridge, drove around a huge block to turn right again onto the Körút and then made a left again under the bridge. The 5-minute detour was needed because the bus stop is placed twenty metres before the end of the bridge. Some genius solved this problem by allowing the night buses to make a left-turn before the bridge onto the Körút.
April 8th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
[…] could catch these vultures easily for once and all, but they are busy doing other things, like designing bridges that don’t connect. You can use the “respectable”, big taxi companies. They […]