As the city is less densely populated, the roads are a little different from what we have in Ljubljana. With the city investing in public transport more, having more infrastructure across the city for it. A great thing is also that, what from I saw till now, there weren’t so many traffic jams than in Ljubljana.
There are massive roundabouts across the whole city, but they are different to what we have in Slovenia. You never quite knew, if the intersection was a roundabout or not, because there were no left turn lanes on busy intersections, so you needed to first make a right turn, followed by a U-turn and go straight through the intersection, looking very similar as a roundabout, but with the added crossroad in the middle. The cycle lanes are also different, because there are in the middle of the road and to say that in logistical terms, the cycle lanes are in the median of the road. There are a lot of traffic lanes everywhere, even where there is no traffic buildup, there are multiple driving lanes. A lot of trees are also placed between the sidewalk and the lanes of traffic, making the roads less of an eyesore. But we all both heard and saw that there are more accidents, collisions and fender benders on the roads, with everybody saying that some people just can’t drive.
There are a lot of bus lanes throughout the whole city, not only in the city centre. The bus stops also have a higher boarding level than the normal curbs, with the bus stops having a kind of elevated platform, making it possible to almost have level boarding to go on the bus. There is also a tram line in the city. Weirdly it seems they have certain special trams, because I hadn’t seen overhead wires, from which the trams usually get their electricity from, in the city centre. But when I was going to the company Avanza, meeting the tram line more outside the city centre it did have overhead wires. The trams may have a kind of hybrid system, which allows them running even without being connected to electricity at all times.
I think if Ljubljana would have these roads, we wouldn’t have any issues with traffic, but the only think I don’t want is the increased risk of collisions, which from what we heard isn’t caused mostly by the design of the roads, more like the opposite, with these designs being safer. However, we also heard that the designs of the roads have caused some problems, like one story was that a tree was at fault that the bus had crashed…, this was obviously not the driver’s fault.
