Bollards Under the Church: Prague 7 Closes the Rat-Run Past Stross School

Technická správa komunikací closed a well-used shortcut through Strossmayerovo náměstí on 28 August, installing blocking bollards and changing the mandatory signage at the junction below the church of sv. Antonín. The measure is aimed at drivers who have no destination in Prague 7 and were using the square, and the street past ZŠ Stross, to get somewhere else.

Prague 7 set out both the manoeuvre being blocked and the reasoning in an announcement the same day.

The manoeuvre

The pattern the district describes is specific. Drivers coming from the centre across Hlávkův most and down Bubenská towards Veletržní would find Veletržní's throughput restricted at peak. Rather than queue, they turned on Bubenská back towards the centre — roughly at the level of Antonínská — and doubled around the former Elektrické podniky building. From there a right turn took them under the church of sv. Antonín, past the Stross primary school, and on into the densely populated, traffic-calmed part of Prague 7.

The pay-off for the driver was avoiding both the Letná tunnel and the congestion on Veletržní and Bubenská. The cost, in the district's account, fell on residents and on people on foot around Strossmayerovo náměstí, in reduced comfort and reduced safety.

What was installed

Three things, according to Prague 7:

• changed mandatory traffic signage at the junction below the church of sv. Antonín;
• blocking bollards, added specifically to prevent what the district expects would otherwise be mass non-compliance with the new rules;
• new horizontal road markings.

The bollards are the part that carries the argument. A sign alone at a junction of this kind regulates only drivers willing to be regulated, and the district says plainly that it put in physical obstruction because it expected the rule to be broken on a large scale.

Access is not absolute. Emergency service vehicles and municipal waste collection retain passage — Prague 7 attributes that to their ability to use warning lights.

Where the traffic is meant to go

The stated aim is to push these trips back onto nábřeží Kpt. Jaroše, heading for the Letná tunnel, which the district calls the main through road and where it says transit traffic primarily belongs.

That is a redistribution, not a removal. The announcement does not say how many vehicles a day were making the shortcut, nor what the measure is expected to add to flows on the embankment or on Veletržní. Prague 7 apologises for the delays associated both with the installation and with the new arrangement "until the traffic situation settles" — an acknowledgement that the immediate effect on some journeys is a slower one.

The district frames the change as part of a larger effort: it is landing alongside a pedestrian zone currently being created on Strossmayerovo náměstí itself, and it says the two together should calm the whole of lower Holešovice further.

Worth reading in a month

Rat-runs are usually invisible in the citywide press, which is why this one is worth logging: a physical intervention in the street network, made by TSK rather than the district, at a school gate and a church, on a route that only the people living on it could see clearly.

The open question is displacement. The measure works if the trips return to the embankment; it merely moves the problem if drivers find the next unprotected turn instead. Nothing in the district's statement commits to counting either way, and no review date is given.