Accessibility city centre Tilburg. In the light of the Masterplan for its city centre the municipality of Tilburg, in co-operation with external advisers, has developed integral proposals for the accessibility of the city centre. To accomplish this the mayor and city council have put aside prior taken policy standpoints, for research has showed that the policy intentions and the decisions taken will not result into a durable, logical and balanced traffic-system. The expected traffic-movements, as a result of the concentration of the city-centre with large projects such as Spoorzone and Pieter Vreedeplein, will lead to congestion and to other traffic- bottlenecks. A new traffic system is necessary which will provide for a better road to the future. Systematic research to a number of different traffic-circulation-systems has lead to a surprising outcome. The implementation of a one-way traffic system on the city ring will be combined with specific traffic-circulation proposals for the Piushaven, with improvement of the eastern road into the city, with the construction of the Noordlaan and with the move of the bus station to the northern-side of the train station. The result is positive. The extra space on the city ring, caused by the smaller amount of through-traffic, makes it possible to facilitate the future citycentre traffic in a controlled manner. On top of that the new traffic-system results into more ‘quality-space’ on sides of a large part of the city-ring: more space for pedestrians, bicyclists, leisure and green. The proposals, which are closely interdependent, will result in the improvement of the complete accessibility-profile. It has advantages for bikers, public transportation, pedestrians and cars. The proposals have been developed in an intensive and formal process in which the city council and city officials were closely involved, and are part of the Masterplan for the city-centre on which the city-council of Tilburg will make a decision in November of 2003. (Author/publisher)
Abstract