Take this as my little recap and optional article for those interested in why everything takes so long to build in the Czech Republic. Yesterday, the Brandýs-Boleslav council approved a memorandum of cooperation on the construction of the Prague-Brandýs-Stará Boleslav train line. The signing of the memorandum was approved last week by the Central Bohemian Region Council, and Prague and other municipalities along the route, Kbely and Vinoř (municipal districts of Prague), Podolanka and Přezletice, are to join. All twenty-one councillors were in favour. It took just over six years to get to this point. How did it happen?
Six years ago, I was sitting with Marek Rebíček and Miloš over wine, complaining that nothing was happening in the town. And that the traffic was tragic. That we wish the train would go to Prague. And then we said to each other that we were the ones who didn’t swear and solved the problem.
We asked another friend who builds these things and he laid out a four-point plan called PPPP - support, design, money, build. And he told us right away that the Support would be the biggest problem, because there are a lot of people with pitchforks in the closet that can be thrown in. And they’re only going to do it because it would somehow change their power environment and they don’t want to deal with how.
That’s when Mark and I said to each other that first we have to make the project non-negotiable. That it should be a given that such a line was to be built and that the debate was only about where the line would go or what colour the cars would be. But how does a project become non-negotiable? By having such a reputation and support that it becomes less profitable to be against it than to be for it. And so we thought we needed to start talking about it.
If you know me and Mark, you know we’re not little people. We parted with the idea that we needed to get a train and a place for the train so that we could raise the profile of the issue before the local elections.
A week later we evaluated the search. Marek arranged in Olomouc the possibility to buy one car of the iconic T3 tram, I had the opportunity to buy cheaply from a filmmaker friend a cattle car from the film, which was used to transport prisoners to the concentration camp. It also had a Reichsbahn spray paint job. Probably not surprising that we ended up taking the tram. And we brought it to Stara Boleslav. That’s how it all started, because everybody wrote about it, and they brought out the dusty routes from Křižík, SŽDC and others. And all those who were interested started to gather under the flag of the project. And that there were such people.
At the beginning everything was slow. Mostly they laughed at us. Not that they questioned that the line wasn’t needed. Not at all. The taunts were mostly along the lines of “you can’t build anything in the Czech Republic” or “no one will let you do that”.
Basically, it turned out to be crucial to find someone in every area of the project with a good reputation, who is not resigned to the fact that nothing will be built, nothing will be approved, and who is able to do his part regardless of the fact that now we don’t know how the project will proceed. Draw the route (I’ll draw the route, but to do that someone has to calculate the economics and no one will do that), calculate the economics (I’ll do that for you if you have the route, but the zoning, I don’t think anyone will do that for you), the land development principles (Snow, that you’ll look at) - and so on and so forth. An incredible part of the practical work was pulled by Martin Raibr, who understands railway line design perfectly. Rober Pecha, Honza Jirovský and gradually other people from the area are helping.
And coincidence also helped a lot: Prague needs to complete the bypass, but it needs the consent of the municipalities. And their mayors argued that the bypass will bring a lot of traffic to their villages (yes, the models say it will) and that they need an alternative. The train has become one of the pending conditions of the Prague bypass. After all, why should the municipalities accommodate Prague if it does not accommodate them in the same way, in terms of transport services?
! Zdeněk Hřib, the then mayor of Prague, came to the meeting and Jan Jirovský and I are showing people that we both have a mobile for Hřib](/assets/taky-mame-mobile-na-hriba.jpg)
Without two dozen other people, nothing like this could have happened. Each of them added a piece to the pile in turn. And today we are faced with something that is already hard to refuse. Something that makes a lot of sense, that has a bunch of people behind it, pushing, pulling.
We’ve sat in meetings with senior managers of the institutions concerned and the gentlemen from SŽ are grumbling that they can’t imagine anything like this ever being built. That this is the youngest railway project on their table.
I listen to them and I tell them that they don’t have any project on the table that is at an advanced stage of approval by all concerned. That they’re not even able to build a new rail crossing through one community because they’re frozen on the community’s disapproval. And here they have something on their plate where all the consents are there. And that when they want to build something, not just endlessly replace sleepers, that they know where to turn. It’s not going to be the Kladno track.
There was a moment of silence and then the gentleman, in a calm, steady and unusually quiet voice, replied that this was a very compelling argument that he hadn’t thought about.
And so it is. At some point there will be someone who wants to build a track in their lifetime. At that moment, we come along, pull out our drawings, papers, approvals, and ask, in a whisper, if he wants to build it here in two years or somewhere else in twenty…
The memorandum doesn’t mean much. And yet it is a lot. It’s a squashed ball over the edge of a hill. It means a commitment by all the communities along the route to act in their common interest and that it won’t happen that a piece of the line disappears from the master plan. Sure, the ZUR should address that, but because of our method of preparation (with respect to speed), that hasn’t been an option yet, so that’s also why it’s like this.
What’s next? We have support. Now we need a detailed project and money, which I believe we will get. Building will be the least of it. The support lasted six years. The project? I estimate five, we’ll spend the next four years raising money, and in three years the first phase to Brandýs will be built. If we keep pushing, if we keep pushing. Now, my situation is slightly complicated by the fact that I no longer represent the city and I’m going to meetings “just because”.
A bunch of things can still go wrong and nothing may come to fruition. But we also wouldn’t have gotten this far if Mark and I hadn’t said we were going to buy a streetcar six years ago…
PS: Want an anecdotal story? A gentleman calls me to ask me if the tram in Marian Square is mine. It is. He needs confirmation that it’s there. I ask why. He drove onto the property, turned his car around and slammed his fifth door on the tram’s tail, which he missed. The insurance company returned his claim, saying it was a fraud attempt because trams don’t run in Stara Boleslav…
