People living and working in Prague 7’s Holešovice neighborhood are girding themselves for a solid two years of traffic complications following a decision by Prague’s city council that the Liben bridge should be torn down and replaced. Inhabitants got a taste of what this will entail at the beginning of the year when the bridge was closed for emergency repairs for a month after engineers determined it was in such poor shape so as to be unfit for use. But the repairs are only temporary, so the Prague council has been wrangling ever since whether it makes more sense to build an entirely new bridge or carry out a complex repair of the 90 year old Cubist structure.
The council defended testerday’s decision with the claim that it would be cheaper and quicker to replace the bridge with a new one. Not everyone agrees with this, however. “The correct approach is to build a temporary bridge and then carry out a reconstruction or hold an architectural competition for a new bridge,” said Prague 7 mayor Jan Čižinský, according to the daily Metro. “Reconstruction, as we know today, meets everyone’s demands.” The new bridge would be 26 meters high (5 meters higher than the current one), will have a green strip between the tram lines and the car lanes and will include an extra lane for bikers. It’s expected to cost at least CZK 500m.
