Building work began for the first park and ride car park in Brussels on Monday morning, next to the Ceria metro station in Anderlecht. The first stone was laid in the presence of the Brussels Minister for Transport, Pascal Smet, the Mayor, Eric Tomas, and the Alderwoman for Transport, Elke Roex.
The car park will have 1,200 car parking spaces, 150 spaces reserved for shared vehicles and 270 for bikes. The multimodal area, intended for motorcycles, bicycles, shared cars and electric vehicles, is on the ground floor.
The construction cost for this 30,000 m2 building is some €14 million. Didier Peremans, from the architects’ firm DDS+, said, “We have given serious consideration to greatly reducing the overall floor space. Consequently this will improve the permeability of the floor surface.” The completion of the building works has been scheduled for the end of 2018 or possibly the beginning of 2019. The finished building will be managed by the parking agency Parking.brussels. Those using public transport will be offered a preferential tariff.
The minister, Pascal Smet has made a firm commitment saying, “From now on, each year in the next few years, we will build a new park and ride car park.”
He goes on, “It takes time for people to change their habits, but this has to be done. In the future, we will run campaigns on journey times to reach the centre of Brussels, so as to prove that the metro is the quickest means of transport. Our transport policy anticipates that there are alternatives to using the car: these include building park and ride car parks, the use of cycle lanes, investing in public transport, transforming urban motorways into urban boulevards and other policies. Our policy is coherent in the sense that it aims to transform Brussels, so that it is longer a city for cars but for pedestrians.”
The Brussels region’s ambition is to create 10,000 spaces in park and ride car parks. The other park and ride car park projects located in the Stalle station in Uccle, the Delta station in Kraainem, the Esplanade stop in Laeken and Car Park C at Heysel are each at various stages of the pre-construction process.
The Brussels Times
