Brussels, (Brussels Morning)- The inhabitants of the Marolles do not feel heard about the circulation plan. That said Marolliens Younes El Abdi and Mustapha Chanouf Monday evening during an interpellation at the city council in Brussels City. They want everyone to be able to make their voice heard about the mobility changes in their neighbourhood, and are therefore asking for a plebiscite to be organised, says BRUZZ.
The municipal council can organise a plebiscite at the request of the residents. Residents must collect sufficient signatures for this. This concerns ten percent in municipalities with at least 30,000 inhabitants, such as Brussels City.
Al Abdi and Chanouf already collected several thousand signatures against the circulation plan with the petition ‘Suppression du plan good move à la ville de Bruxelles’. If the college of aldermen does not respond, they will request a municipal plebiscite. This requires almost 19,000 signatures in total.
The duo points out the difficulties that residents of the Marolles and Lemonnier neighbourhoods face: people who have to drive long detours to take the elderly parents to the hospital by car. Public transport does not always offer a fully-fledged alternative for those with walking difficulties. Chanouf also points to the shopkeepers in the Lemonnierlaan who have already suffered from the works on metro 3, corona and inflation.
Alderman Bart Dhondt (Green) reiterated during the city council the raison d’être of the circulation plan: improve road safety, combat pollution, create more outdoor space for families. “We are not against a more livable city,” El Abdi responds. “How can you be against that? But we are against bad governance. So far we have only seen more traffic chaos in the neighbourhood instead of less.”
Participation
Chanouf and El Abdi call for a broad consultation, in which all those involved are heard, including commuters from Walloon Brabant who come to work in Brussels. Dhondt explains that there were indeed moments of participation.
The social media campaigns reached a total of more than 1.7 million people. Information boards with a reference to the toll-free number in the call centre were placed in the neighbourhoods concerned. Dhondt sat around the table with three hundred people, contacted organisations and also heard five hundred people via the online platform. “But all those phases are now behind us,” it sounds. “Now we are in the implementation phase.”
But Chanouf and El Abdi don’t stop there. If the plebiscite fails, they want to go to the Council of State. The target? “Cancel the circulation plan and create a new circulation plan that everyone agrees with,” Chanouf says.
Later in the evening , the city council will vote against the motion of the MR and Open VLD with the proposal to temporarily stop the circulation plan . This happened after a long discussion within the city council in which the Marolliens received support from various parties. Perhaps the most outspoken support came from the PTB/PVDA – the only party that also voted against when the circulation plan came to the city council in February. The opposition party first wants to expand and improve the public transport offer.
