Opening of Incomplete New Bus Station Belgrade Not Before Spring After All

The new Belgrade Bus Station (BAS) has been built in phases and with interruptions in Block 42 for years back, but it is not moving from the Sava Amphitheater to this new address any time soon. Year after year, the deadlines for the completion of the station complex are being moved. At the end of the summer and during the autumn, based on the announcements from the Old Palace, it could have been concluded that the moving of the bus traffic from the current BAS to the unfinished one in New Belgrade in January was certain and that the first buses would set off from the new station then. The president of the Temporary Organ of the City of Belgrade, Aleksandar Sapic, emphasized that on several occasions, and at the end of November, so did the head city urban planned, Marko Stojcic.

However, to everybody who has passed by Block 42 lately, it has been easy to see that the works on the canopies and fences at the new complex are still in progress, that is, that putting the station into operation soon is not certain. That the announcements from the Old Palace about moving the traffic to the new BAS by the end of this month had been too optimistic was indicated by a recent statement made by somebody in whose time, at that same Old Palace (in the summer of 2017), “the final document which was a precondition for the beginning of the construction of the new BAS” was signed – Sinisa Mali. The then mayor and now finance minister recently pointed out that “the Belgrade Bus Station should also be completed in the spring, most likely in April.”

Even if the new BAS truly ends up being put into operation in April, it will not mean it is really completed – because it won’t have the station building, which has not progressed beyond the foundations for a long time now. In case the authorities don’t give up on moving to the new complex in Block 42, which is not very likely, it means that the new station will begin serving the passengers the same way Prokop, which is several kilometers away, once did. It got the building more than five years after it became the main rail station.

The new station will have 65 platforms, and until the station building is raised, the passengers will buy tickets in a prefab facility, that is, the annex that was built several years ago – the heated corridor between the future BAS in Block 42 and the New Belgrade rail station. It was equipped earlier, but as the employees at BAS have pointed out on several occasions, the annex is nowhere near to being sufficient for serving the needs of the passengers, nor will it have enough ticket sale points, compared to the number of the counters at the existing BAS.

In the past, there were construction activities at the future BAS in phases, and then, until recently, there were no activities at all. The financing of the further works was officially cited as one of the main barriers. The works continued once, after more than a year, an agreement was reached with BAS according to which the city was to continue the construction of the station with the obligation of paying to BAS the money previously invested in the construction of the new bus complex.

The beginning of the works on the new BAS, let us remind, was marked during Sinisa Mali’s mandate as the mayor of Belgrade, and the symbolic foundation stone was laid down during the city election campaign in 2018 when it was announced that Belgrade would get the new BAS shortly.

Employees criticizing high construction price, DRP changes, property-related problems…

The construction of the new BAS so far has been nearly constantly accompanied by criticism from its employees – due to the high price of its construction and the company’s debts, as well as the fear that, with the opening of the new station complex, several hundred workers would lose their jobs. On top of that, there have been other problems when it comes to the new complex – the property-legal problems on the land in Block 42, as well as the changes made to the Detailed Regulation Plan for Block 42, because it was subsequently determined that the station building had to be bigger.

D. A.

BAS Beogradska autobuska stanica a.d. Beograd

BAS

Belgrade Bus Station

Siniša Mali

Aleksandar Šapić

Marko Stojčić

Block 42

Sava Amphitheater

property legal problems

Detailed Regulation Plan for Block 42