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Monday, May 30. 2011
Local public transport
All russian cities we visited had a very well working public transport system. It consists of metros, trams, busses, trolleybusses and minibusses.On the metro, you pay for a coin (Yekaterinburg) or ticket (Moscow) before entering the area.
On Trams, you usually just get on the tram and there's a person where you can buy a ticket in the tram. It has a fixed price, which is usually between 10 and 20 rubels (about 0.25 to 0.50 €), if you need to switch the tram, you pay again. On busses, it's sometimes the same, if there's no person collecting ticket fees, you pay to the driver when leaving the bus. Same with trolleybusses and minibusses.
As long as you know which line to take, this is quite convenient. Usually, all lines come quite frequently, you only wait some minutes if you miss one. There was only one occasion where we had to take a taxi in Russia (to get the ferry to Port Baikal in time - the ferry itself worked like the trams, you pay on the ferry).
In Ulaanbaator, we found it a bit harder, mainly because we never really found out which bus to take (no tram or metro here). The ticket system is the same (you pay to a ticket seller on the bus). The busses here are often very overcrowded. Taxis here are really cheap, so that's what many people use.
Friday, October 1. 2010
Police violence for Stuttgart 21
Picture by Chris Grodotzki/Robin Wood
The project in question, Stuttgart 21, is the plan to bring Stuttgart's main train station underground. The current railhead station is planned to be replaced by a through station. The majority of the local population is opposed to that project for various reasons. The new station has only eight tracks while the current one has 16. Before the project has even started, the costs have more than doubled, currently five billion Euros are expected – but even the governor of Baden-Württemberg, Stefan Mappus, admitted that it probably will be more than seven billion. Critics expect it to be much more.
For that, local public transport services have been cut down in the area. Various other savings in social services were done in order to finance the megaproject, for example the subsidies for pupils' bus tickets have been cut. Stuttgart 21 is not a public transport project, it's a public transport cut down. It is mainly an urban construction project, because it will free a large area of rail tracks. The city's mayor Wolfgang Schuster promised a referendum after his last election if the costs of the project raise – he lied, the referendum never took place. Two years ago, environmentalists tried to enforce a referendum by collecting signatures. But it was not approved due to legal reasons – the laws for direct democracy in Baden-Württemberg are upon the worst in whole Germany.
In the park beside the station 300 trees need to be cut for the project. For that reason, activists from the envrionmental organization Robin Wood and others have built tree platforms in some of them in the past weeks. Many average people had declared in advance that they will take part on acts of civil dissobedience to protect the park and called themselves „Parkschützer“ (park protectors).
The violent operation took place on the 30th september. Thousands of policemen evicted the park with water cannons, pepper spray and police batons. In the night, about 20 trees got cut. Afterwards, the local Interior Minister Heribert Rech defended the police act by saying that the protestors had thrown stones. Some hours later he had to admit that this was a false information. Still, and despite of hundrets who got injured, he and the local governor Stefan Mappus from the CDU (conservative party) claimed the police act was completely legitimate.
For (german) information see:
http://www.kopfbahnhof-21.de/
http://www.parkschuetzer.de/
http://www.bei-abriss-aufstand.de/
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