The mayor of Porto, Rui Moreira, admitted this Tuesday that BUS lanes have become parking lots, asking for higher fines for those who park incorrectly than for those who forget to validate on the metro.
“We open BUS lanes and what happens? Half an hour after we opened a BUS lane, it became a parking lot,” Rui Moreira acknowledged this Tuesday in a debate on mobility with his Lisbon counterpart, Carlos Moedas, at the Almeida Garrett Municipal Library, organized by Rádio Renascença.
The mayor of Porto said that Nowadays “it is worth it” to park incorrectly, “because the fine is small”.
“Anyone understands that a bastard who travels on the subway and forgot to validate pays 120 euros [de multa]And the guy who stops the Porsche on the sidewalk pays 30? I apologize if this seems demagogic, but it is not,” he stressed.
The mayor of Porto said that has already made a request to the Minister of the InteriorMargarida Blasco, to transfer these powers to the town councils, since they regulate traffic.
“The car, for a long time, dominated the cities. He appropriated public space. In Porto, the trams were finished because of the cars. Trolleybuses ended because of cars. Due to bad parking, because the trams could not circulate,” he added.
Currently, the circulation of STCP (Sociedade Transportes Colectivos do Porto) buses is also conditioned by traffic, Rui Moreira recalling that in 2023 it reached the lowest value (15.4 kilometers per hour) since 2005, and “in Lisbon Exactly the same thing is happening,” with Carris losing more than 1.2 million kilometers of service, as reported by the newspaper Público in June.
“Why does this occur? Due to the limitations posed by individual transport and beyond, also due to the exponential and absurd increase in urban logistics,” considered Rui Moreira.
According to the president of the municipality of Porto, “Urban logistics is a big problem”since “he is constantly stopping, normally, in the BUS aisles.”
“All this will have to be regulated. So yes, they should give instruments to the cities,” he argued.
According to the mayor of Porto, urban logistics operators “must understand that the congestion created in the city is forcing the creation of logistics platforms where people will have to go look at their locker for the book they have ordered from Amazon.”
“You can’t have a van that arrives at your door, stops on the sidewalk, knocks on the door, waits half an hour for someone to open the door to give you a package from Amazon that is a meter long and has a 30-page book inside. centimeters,” he considered.
For Rui Moreira, “Cities cannot withstand this pressureand either they are able to regenerate themselves, or then there begins to be a revolt, the people themselves begin to rebel against it.”
In Lisbon, Carlos Moedas observed that in 2018, 300,000 cars entered the capital daily, and currently there are “more or less 400,000.”
“The first point that we must consider in the city of Lisbon is how we prevent these cars from entering Lisbon”, being one of the “most important” measures, in his opinion, the “construction of many Navegante car parks, that is to say “Everyone Those who have their monthly transport pass will be able to leave their car” at no additional cost.
The idea is to “leave the cars at the entrance [da cidade] and take transport, which is what is done in most European cities.”
In Lisbon, 50% of the city’s carbon dioxide emissions are due to transportation, and the municipality wants to reduce that figure to 34% by 2030, and this can only be done with modal shift [passagem do automóvel para o transporte público] 30% of people.
The mayor of Lisbon also defended that he should be the head of his position at the head of his metropolitan area, since “it represents 80% of the region’s economy”, but in his counterpart of Porto, Rui Moreira considered that Porto does not It has the same centrality. metropolitan.
Source: Observadora
