Policy Innovation:The Brussels police authority today made public its opinion on and proposed solution for the infamous problem of lack of parking spaces in Brussels. The objective is to drastically improve the lives and mental states of the fundamentally disillusioned and occasionally even deeply depressed car owners.A spokeswoman for the authority explained that real-time problems required real-time solutions. Such solutions, she went on to emphasise, needed to be innovative and flexible. In 21st century Brussels a police approach based only on enforcing traditional parking rules was not appropriate and sufficient anymore, nor was the communal one focusing only on areas of paid parking in order to balance the budgets of creche, school, sports and environmental policies.
Journalists were told at an open air press conference organised next to a police logistics building in Ixelles that the police authority recently concluded successfully a pilot project in the Ixelles Commune and had already entered in discussions with other public authorities to evaluate the project results and eventually follow the example of the police authority.
At the end of the press conference pictures of the project were shown to clarify exactly how the police authority was innovatively producing real-time parking solutions. The spokeswoman elaborated that in front of many police buildings pavements were extraordinarily spacious despite not serving any purpose. Therefore car owners would from today onwards be permitted to park on these pavements.
Asked by journalists as to whether this new approach was not condemmed by pedestrians, specifically parents with prams, wheel chair users and elderly people with walking aids and shopping bags on wheels the spokeswoman brushed aside complaints and criticism as unfounded and conservative even from a 20th century perspective adding that technically speaking most of these traffic participants would be on wheels or using wheels and therefore should use the streets and not the pavements.
END
