So I recently made this thread on twitter https://twitter.com/Asnowtimes/status/1605321487094800394?t=OIkmZN_EKHryBdhy-1QpRg&s=19

And following this, I’d like to have more information about how we design urban areas in Wallonia.

So the road I’m talking about in the thread (the N98) has been built around roughly the same period as Charleroi’s Ring.

My questions and concerns are : back in the days, was it just allowed to build obviously dangerous roads like this one ? Was there no safety rules at all ? Who built this and who allowed it ?

Nowadays, things aren’t much better. We didn’t improve the design of our roads, everything just feels awkward and poorly designed.

One problem I noticed is that we keep allowing the build new houses, new shops and shopping centers right on the side of a road, that way it doesn’t require any more infrastructure to build.

As an example there is the shopping center alongside the N98 that is just a complete nightmare, if you don’t know the place, I don’t even know how you figure out how you can go from one place to the other.

Those kind of designs are everywhere in Wallonia and arguebly Belgium. Driving always feels awkward, like everything isn’t clear enough. Obviously it is also very unfriendly to pedestrians and cyclists.

Is there no proper urban planners in Wallonia ? Or is it because of a lack of money ? When will we stop building messy stuff like that ?

3 comments

  2. I know in the case of the whole southern part of Charleroi, the initially drafted plans weren’t followed. The R3 in fact should have gone much further south, through Montigny-le-Tilleul, Ham-sur-Heure-Nalinnes, bordering Walcourt and Gerpinnes… but it seems these towns refused to have any sort of highway pass through them. The result is that the N5 has a highway-like traffic while really not being prepared for it, especially once past Nalinnes.

    Recently there were projects to fix that, a project named ‘Trident Light’ in particular, aiming to connect from Nalinnes-Bultia to the A503 to the west, and to Châtelet then all the way to the N90 to the east. While some officials did some (illegal) works for it, the local population managed to stop it, although for what I know, the officials didn’t get in any kind of trouble.

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    What I know of the past, based on my grandfather’s sayings, pictures and newspapers, is the N5, before the R3 was built, actually featured extensive tramway traffic ; a lot of these southern villages actually had trams go through until the 1980s when it all got dismantled ; the space the tracks occupied was usually given to the neighboring houses, except for the N5 itself where it actually was made a road. Now, well, all these houses along the N5 are in fact pretty old, so we can’t blame new buildings on this one.

    It just seems we dismantled tramways because ‘we don’t need them now we have cars and highways’, from my understanding. And I fear that mentality might have gone a lot of places, making highways and national roads zigzaging through villages without moving anybody, because the locals of course wouldn’t be happy about it. I guess it is nice the locals saved their houses, but here we are now… I do not know how one could have solved this issue, honestly.

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    I feel like train lines have suffered the same way, having to curve left and right through villages, therefore reducing speed capabilities.

  3. > I knew this country never really cared about doing things well

    Why are people on twitter such assholes?

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