Kai Wegner arrives in Warsaw on his first trip abroad as Governing Mayor Photo: Stefan Peter
By Stephen Peter
On Sunday, Kai Wegner (50, CDU) took the plane in economy class to Warsaw – the Polish capital is the destination of his first trip abroad as the head of the town hall.
The narrow-minded fight against the car – under Kai Wegner that’s over for the time being. Friedrichstraße will be reopened to motor vehicles on July 1st, and the Governing Mayor can now even imagine new parking spaces in the capital!
Directly from the airport we went to the company dcx. It converts vehicles to mobile parking space surveillance (costs: 200,000 euros).
Since its introduction, the illegal parking rate in Warsaw has fallen from 20 to 2 percent! There are nine vehicles there, and a test with three vehicles will be running in Berlin until the end of the year.
Kai Wegner in the old town of Warsaw Photo: Stefan Peter
Wegner on the BZ: “For me, the most exciting thing about this project is what you can do with the collected data – of course, taking data protection into account. Namely controlling traffic better, identifying new parking spaces where they are needed and perhaps also using parking spaces differently where they are not used. But not the way it was in the past, just eliminating parking spaces.”
But Wegner is also open to blocking some places for car traffic. “I believe that there are squares and streets in Berlin where you can increase the quality of stay if you completely eliminate car traffic there.”
In the evening Wegner met his Warsaw counterpart Rafal Trzaskowski (51) Photo: Senate Chancellery Berlin Senate
In the evening, Wegner met his counterpart Rafal Trzaskowski (51) in Warsaw City Hall. Today he wants to discuss possible help for Kiev with mayors of other European capitals.