Culture Ministry Presents Alternative Route for New Tram Line Bypassing SND

Bratislava, July 19 (TASR) – The Culture Ministry, along with activists and experts, has presented an alternative new tram route in the wider centre of Bratislava that would bypass the new Slovak National Theatre (SND) building on Pribinova Street in Bratislava and could partly run underground, Culture Minister Natalia Milanova (OLaNO) announced at a news conference on Tuesday.

At the same time, the ministry has asked Bratislava City Council to cooperate in forming a working group to assess the proposal.

Milanova said that the ministry continues to oppose a new tram route in front of the SND building, pointing to problems that vibrations and noise from the tram line could cause for the theatre. “Although a kind of compromise route has been presented by Bratislava City Council, we don’t view the given proposal as a suitable solution,” she added.

When presenting the ministry’s alternative, Milanova said that she doesn’t see it as the only viable solution and that she’ll personally support any route that won’t threaten the functioning of SND and won’t degrade the public premises in front of it.

Conductor and composer Anton Popovic presented the alternative solution on behalf of activists. “Along with an expert team, we’ve prepared two variants for a route bypassing SND with a total length of 1,500 metres,” he said. “In one of the variants almost 800 metres of the line passes under the surface,” he said. The submitters view this variant as the best in terms of keeping the impact on traffic to a minimum.

Bratislava City Council still insists that a variant by which trams would pass the front of the theatre would be the best as long as adequate measures are implemented. The council announced a plan to build a tram line in front of the new SND building in 2019.