Budapest trams - A perspective of a tram fan

Just came across a page almost entirely dedicated to the trams in Budapest. It is produced and maintained by someone using the webonym Hamster and it sure does contain a lot of information on trams. Although it is mostly in Hungarian, there is at least some information on the website in English and an incredible amount of photos on the subject.



I never used to think of trams as something you would love. They are noisy, slow and shake the hell out of you. But after having gone through some of Hamster's blog entries and after having looked at the pictures, I know I will never look at a tram the old way. And this is not just Hamster, there are plenty of other tram geeks around. If you read through the feedback area of his blog, you will find a large number of enthusiastic comments on both the web page and trams in general.

Gábor Demszky Candidate for Mayor of Budapest in 2006

According to SZDSZ sources, the current mayor of Budapest, Gábor Demszky will be the liberal candidate for the position in the 2006 elections, too. It may be the fifth time for Demszky to become the mayor of Budapest.

Despite the problems in the city, Demszky is strongly supported by the citizens of Budapest. It is believed that he has every chance to win the local government elections held in the autumn, even against the candidate of the election-winning MSZP. An article on index.hu adds that Demszky might be able to win against a candidate supported by both MSZP and SZDSZ. On the other hand, MSZP has not made its intentions clear regarding the government elections. It is possible that the party will withdraw its candidate in favor of Demszky, or nominate Demszky as the runner-up of the MSZP-SZDSZ coalition.

Gyula Molnár, mayor of the 11th district of Budapest and the Budapest president of MSZP pointed out that personal matters are insignificant as long as MSZP and SZDSZ comes to an agreement during the local government elections in all the 23 districts of Budapest. According to Molnár, such agreements will also be needed in the city leadership, as MSZP intends to establish a cooperation in order to replace the sole decision of the mayor in financial and development matters.
An announcement is expected from Gábor Demszky during May 2006 about his participation in the autumn local government elections.

New Countdown System in Budapest Metro

The recently established new countdown timers in the Budapest metro have already created many contradictions among the passengers, most of which make sense to everyone but the responsible decision-makers of the Budapest Public Transport Company (BKV).

The original “countdown” system still in use on the Red metro line (M2) was established in the middle of the 1990’s on both the Red and the Blue lines (M3). Countdown is not even a proper term to describe the old equipment, as the digital clocks above the platform of each station were actually counting up, showing the seconds passed since the departure of the last train from the station. While this was not very practical and did not make much sense, passengers got used to this over the decade.

In March 2006, BKV presented the travelers of the M3 line with new clocks. These “modern” contraptions are actually counting down (a feature BKV is very proud of), and would be able to inform the people precisely on how much they will have to wait for the next train – if they were counting in seconds. But instead, the new “state of the art” clocks count down in half minutes. Many passengers actually believed that the clocks are out of order since the same number was being displayed on them for a long time.

According to BKV officials, the testing of the clocks ended with positive responses from travelers and is also a technical success. Hence, they do not intend to change the half-minute units of the countdown to seconds even though the clocks would be capable of measuring time in such small units, proving once again that large corporations sometimes insist on avoiding common sense.
BKV plans to establish the same countdown clock system on the other two metro lines, the Millennium Underground Railway (M1) and the Red line (M2). New, supposedly also half-minute based clocks will be placed in all Budapest metro stations by the end of the reconstruction of the whole M2 line, 2007.

The restituted Sárospatak library on display

Over the weekend I also visited the Hungarian National Museum where some of the books from the newly restituted Sárospatak library are on display. The exhibition is titled "Itt az írás, forgassátok!" which has been rendered into English as "Take the scripture and turn its leaves." Unfortunately, this is not a very telling translation, it should have been translated along the lines of "Here is the scripture, keep reading it!"

In any case, the exhibition is great, and it is in a perfect environment. These are all books that have been "lost" during World War II, since the Russian army took them along when they were leaving. They have been lost for half a century and were discovered in the 1990s. According to the new Russian restitution bill, the books were finally returned to Hungary. This generous act was somewhat shadowed by the amount of money the Hungarian government agreed to pay for the "conservation and storage" of these books over the past fifty years.

So now that the books are back in Hungary, it is definitely worth seeing them, they will only be displayed at the National Museum until 15 June, 2006.

Luxury Car Show in Budapest

Went to see the Luxury Car Show (Luxusautó show) over the weekend with the whole family. The show was on at the BNV (Budapest International Fair) from 27 Apr through 1 May. A couple of miles before the BNV there was already a large line of cars trying to get parking near the exhibition ground. Once we parked, a man came up and asked if we had tickets. Hearing that we did not, he asked if we would need a receipt or not and let us in for HUF 3,000, instead of the official HUF 5,500.

Inside there were the cars. Ferraris, Lamborghinis, everything. But it was the crowd that amazed me the most -- people were everywhere, snapping their digital and cell phone cameras. Whether people can afford these cars or not, they just loved them, the general atmosphere was that of elated interest.






It is a shame that the show only lasted for 5 days, I am sure there would have been enough visitors to justify another couple of weeks.