The Dolní Chabry Bypass Is Pulled Out of Its Environmental Screening After 288 Objections

The nature protection department of Prague's city hall has terminated, before it finished, the screening procedure for the Dolní Chabry bypass — the roughly 1.2 kilometre two-lane road planned between Chabry and Čimice. Zdopravy.cz reports that the request to end the process was filed by the design company Pudis; the outlet's own headline describes it as Prague withdrawing its application, and those are not quite the same statement, so we give both as the source gives them.

A screening procedure decides one thing: whether a scheme has to go through a full environmental impact assessment or not. This one will now decide nothing, because it has been stopped.

288 comments in five days

The bypass was being opposed by the district it is named after. The Dolní Chabry council put an online form in front of its residents, and within five days 288 comments went into the procedure through it — all pushing for the full EIA rather than the screening.

The council's mayor, Kateřina Šilhová Šafránková, has said what she wants instead of a surface road.

If it has to be built at all, we would want it in a tunnel, so that some sensible space can be created on top.

— Kateřina Šilhová Šafránková, mayor of Dolní Chabry

The objection the district leans on hardest is not about noise but about coordination. Its own statement, quoted on the district's website, says the bypass as presented is incompatible with the tunnelled solution for the Čimice grade-separated junction now being prepared as part of the D0 ring road. The council has long argued that the cumulative effects of everything being built around it should be assessed together — the ring road, the planned runway extension at Ruzyně, the widening of the D8, the tram line to Zdiby, the residential building going up nearby and the rebuilding of the Kostelecká motorway junction at Zdiby.

Prague wants to hand it to ŘSD

Prague was to be the investor. It is now trying to pass the scheme to the Road and Motorway Directorate, on the grounds that it is bound up with the approaching D0 construction on the Suchdol–Březiněves section. Whether that is why the screening was stopped, the deputy mayor for transport Jaromír Beránek would not say.

All I can confirm is that we are talking to ŘSD about them possibly taking the project over.

— Jaromír Beránek, deputy mayor of Prague for transport

What was actually on the table

The bypass has a completed technical study behind it and not much more. It is about 1.2 km long, and it comes with a rebuild of Dopraváků street over 530 metres, a further 360 metres of K Ládví street, and the road behind the Bauhaus store. K Ládví would be moved onto a new alignment extending Dopraváků; the entrances to the industrial premises there would be adjusted, along with the drainage system and the utility diversions that go with it. The road itself would run between Čimice and Dolní Chabry, following the high-voltage line.

Two things are worth separating here. The district got what it asked for in the short term — the procedure it called inadequate is over — but it got it by the scheme being taken off the table rather than by the full assessment it demanded. And the case the council made, that a kilometre of road cannot be judged in isolation from the motorway junction being designed a few hundred metres away, is the same argument the city appears to have accepted by trying to move the project to the body building that junction. Whether the road comes back smaller, tunnelled, or as part of somebody else's project is the question the next step answers, and there is no date on it.