Prague 10 Now Sends Someone to Walk the Malešice Building Sites Every Day

Prague 10 has come out of a coordination meeting with a set of measures that change how the overlapping building sites in Malešice and Počernická street are run day to day. The mayor, Martin Valovič, convened the meeting on 10 September; around the table were the Prague public transport company (DPP), the water and sewerage utility Pražské vodovody a kanalizace, the contractors building the Počernická tram line, and the firms doing the utility relocations and laying. The district says so in a press release issued on 14 September, which is the only account of the meeting available.

The district's position is worth stating plainly, because it is the reason this was a negotiation rather than an instruction: none of these works are Prague 10's investments and none of them fall under its remit. It has no power to reschedule any of them. What it has is the residents.

What the district got

A member of its own staff now walks the affected area every day. The brief is narrow and physical: whether the signage is legible and in the right place, whether the pedestrian routes past the sites are actually safe, whether people can reach their own front doors. Defects go straight to the responsible person, and anything that can be fixed on the spot is supposed to be fixed within hours. To make that work, the investors and contractors are to hand over direct contacts for staff empowered to deal with acute problems — which is the part that usually fails when several sites share a street.

Prague 10 had already set up a reporting address, pocernicka@praha10.cz, at the end of August, for complaints about passability, signage, cleanliness and site organisation, and passes them to the sites and tracks how fast they are dealt with.

Every party is also to supply schedules in a form the public can read: exact location, what the work is and what it is for, start date, expected completion, and how it depends on the other works in the area. Those go onto a dedicated website the district will launch for the Malešice sites, alongside restrictions, shutdowns and an FAQ. Everyone present promised to give notice of schedule changes and planned water shutoffs.

It is not enough for the route past a site to be marked out as a formality. It has to be genuinely safe, comprehensible and usable by a parent with a pushchair, an older person or someone in a wheelchair.

— Mikuláš Pobuda, councillor for transport, Prague 10 (translated from the Czech)

The spoil is the serious part

Buried in a release mostly about signage and litter is a commitment about excavated soil. Material will be damped down during handling and haulage to hold the dust; a representative of the Prague 10 authority will be present at the first removal of soil classified as waste, and at further removals as circumstances warrant. Sampling continues as the excavation goes on, with results reported to the district — and if new contaminants appear, work stops and a safe procedure has to be agreed before it resumes.

That is a standing right of veto over the schedule, granted to a district that has just said it cannot direct any of these works. It reads as the most consequential thing in the document.

The environment councillor, Milan Maršálek, also secured protection for retained trees, regular clearing of workers' litter, and coordination with the refuse contractor and the Technical Roads Administration so that bin collections do not simply stop for the duration. The site is to expand its own cleaning crew to a daily basis.

Wheelchairs and Centrum Paraple

The meeting gave specific attention to passability for wheelchair users and to the area around Centrum Paraple, which sits in the middle of this. (For context, not from the release: Paraple is a long-established centre for people with spinal cord injuries.) It gets a direct contact at the Počernická tram works for problems with safety or passability, and the contractor has offered a joint inspection of the affected sections so that risk points can be adjusted to what its users actually need.

Prague 10 asks residents not to move barriers or traffic signs themselves — a request that concedes how bad the signage has been.

Not everything being built in Malešice can be directly managed by the district. But we want to deal actively with everything that happens on Prague 10's territory and affects its residents.

— Martin Valovič, mayor of Prague 10 (translated from the Czech)

Whether any of it holds is a question for the months when the tram works are at their worst. The measures are, at least, specific enough to be checked.