Amstelveners who are disturbed by the bus lock in front of the Urbanuskerk on Noorddammerlaan in Amstelveen have little confidence that the municipality will take a good traffic decision this time. The decision must be made by the court back to the drawing boardbecause it was not taken carefully.
Local residents already suspected that the bus lock built last November would not be the solution to make the neighborhood less traffic. “There is now much more traffic through the small streets around it and they are not suitable for so much cut-through traffic,” says Marcel Bellis, who lives in one of those streets. He took the municipality to court together with a neighbor.
It ruled that the municipality provided local residents with false information about the increase in cut-through traffic during the decision-making process and that the process must therefore be repeated. That does not mean that the bus lock has to go now. The municipality can still judge that this is the best solution.
At the invitation of traffic alderman Herbert Raat, local residents talked to him this week, but that conversation did not really boost confidence. “He mainly told how important the municipality considers participation and safety,” Marcel believes. Another person present, who prefers to remain anonymous, is also not impressed by the ‘nice political story’ that the alderman told, according to him.
‘Fooled’
What bothers local residents in particular is that the option that seems best to them, a 30 km zone, will not be put on the table again. “The option to open the road again is not negotiable at all. They are now just going to patch up the decision as much as possible. Then nothing will change at all. We are being fooled from all sides,” says a local resident who was involved in the conversation. was present. Marcel fears that the bus lock will be moved ‘at most a bit to the side’. “I don’t trust it at all,” he sighs.
Raat says in a press release that he will ‘use it in the coming period to work out a number of scenarios, with which we can get started no later than the second quarter of 2023’. If the municipality nevertheless decides to remove the bus lock, it may remain in place for at least six weeks after the new traffic decision has been taken.
Injury
The detested bus lock has already been modified twice in a year, because motorists just kept driving over it. A number of cars and the bus lock itself were damaged as a result, local broadcaster RTV Amstelveen saw.