Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: freeway

I don't know as much about Tunel Blanka as some people, but honestly, how much do people need to know? The project has been going on for years, turning Hradcanska and the north side of Letna into a dirty, noisy construction site, with blasting going on. The blasting has resulted several times in lethally dangerous cave-ins that have opened giant holes in the ground in random locations in parkland full of tourists and hikers, and even the cut-and-cover method of construction often being used isn't what the city said would be used, resulting in massive disruption beyond what they had promised (even if admittedly it's not as dangerous as the blasting). Then there's the purpose....to encourage automobile use and the car culture, increasing traffic congestion in the city and diverting business out of it, potentially collapsing the local economy and leaving taxpayers with an astronomical bill for construction. The reason for this? Apparently they think people are ignorant enough to believe that freeways reduce congestion instead of increasing it. You'd think that after Communism people would know better, but apparently the Communists' ideas about urban transport haven't been adequately discredited, even though everywhere freeways have been built, everywhere in the world, they've been catastrophic failures in traffic abatement.....at least until the local economy collapses to such a degree that all the people leave.

And here's a shot of even worse vandalism, much like you would see in London, or maybe New York circa-1982-89. Now...is that stuff on the ground moss, weeds, or....

Here's a shot of the lovely Cerny Most Metro, at the Cerny Most end of the tubular bridge. In reality, it's not this awful inside the station, just outside. I can't tell what that stuff on the footpath is, but I'm sure you can guess.

Here's a better shot of the tubular bridge for the Metro at Cerny Most. This is one of a few such bridges on Line B. This one runs from Cerny Most to Rajska Zahrada, and the other one runs from Luziny to Hurka. This one is in better condition, although both are heavily vandalised.

In a place as filthy and disgusting as Cerny Most, grafitti, public defecation, litter, and miscellaneous vandalism are inevitable. It seems that these things go on most where people figure the place is so vile that nobody in law enforcement will notice, and come to think of it I've never seen a cop out here (don't count on them not showing up if you're really bad, though). No criminals or cops in this picture, though, just litter, grafitti, and panelaks. Surprisingly, nobody has chosen to take a dump on that roof.

In addition to being Metro connected, even more amazingly Cerny Most has some provisions for pedestrians and cyclists, although not nearly enough. The top of the tubular bridge is reserved for pedestrians, although I don't know if bikes are technically allowed on it. I saw some cyclists on it, though, and in any case the other facilities are so bad you won't see many pedestrians in Cerny Most except in the old Sidliste, so the safety hazard would be minimal.

Cerny Most is so spectacularly repulsive that I thought recently, on another bleak car trip out of Prague, that it is indeed a work of art in revulsion. Gaia Mesiah even have a song about it called "Black Bridge," which isn't any less apocalyptic than their other stuff. The song is called "Black Bridge" because that's literally what "Cerny Most" means. Lovely.... Anyway, it is what it looks like, a chaotic collection of strip malls, freeways, highways, litter, and feces shrouded in air pollution, a product first of Communism (it started as a Sidliste), and then of unrestricted capitalism, meaning American-style sprawl without any regard for the environmental and economic consequences. The only upside is that the building and tubular bridge you see on the left is a Metro station, the eastern terminus of Metro Line B.