Nis High-Speed Rail Protests Spread to Second Municipality
Borska Street residents shut the roundabout on Bulevar Svetog Pantelejmona from 6 to 7 p.m. on Saturday over the high-speed rail route, a day after Humska Street protested for the first time.
Residents of Borska Street and the surrounding neighbourhoods and villages in the Nis municipality of Pantelej will block the roundabout by the Maxi store on Bulevar Svetog Pantelejmona on Saturday, August 1. The blockade starts at 6 p.m. and is announced to last one hour, until 7 p.m. The issue is the high-speed rail route running through a built-up part of Nis.
It follows three consecutive days earlier the same week in which the same residents, unhappy with the solution they were offered, brought traffic in Nis to a halt. Their demand has not moved since. In the call to protest, the organisers ask for “a change to the railway bypass project and the complete relocation of the high-speed rail route outside the urban area of the city”, framing the gathering as a matter of “safety, quality of life and the future of the whole of Nis”.
What the bypass project means for Pantelej
The Nis railway bypass is designed for trains running at up to 160 kilometers per hour. The route crosses city roads at more than 50 points. For Borska Street the change is specific: the existing crossing moves roughly 300 meters to the east, and the line itself is extended by about 450 meters.
Speed is also the planners’ central argument. Marija Markovic of the City of Nis Urban Planning Institute explained during the public review of the project why the crossings cannot stay as they are:
The railway is planned for fast train movement at speeds of up to 160 kilometers per hour, which further affects the safety of road users.
Residents read the same figure the other way. If higher speed means the crossing has to go, the neighbourhood is cut in two, so they are asking for the line to be sunk deeper than planned in order to keep the crossing open.
The revolt reaches Crveni Krst
On Friday, July 31, at 6 p.m., residents of Humska Street in the municipality of Crveni Krst protested for the first time, at the level crossing. The trigger is the ongoing railway works, and the fear is the one that has been driving Pantelej for weeks: that the street will be closed to traffic in both directions.
In the space of a week the protest has moved from a single street to two city municipalities. Ivan Zikic, one of the organisers of the Borska Street protests, boiled the objection down during the public review to the line that “they want to close a crossing that already exists in the neighbourhood”. Asked about the detour offered instead of the crossing, he said that “the bypass that is offered to us as an alternative takes 20 to 25 minutes of driving to reach the city”.
Why rerouting is harder than it sounds
The project is well past the drawing board. The European Investment Bank is part-financing the works, the building permit has been issued, and construction started last year. Moving the line out of the urban area, the residents’ headline demand, would not be a correction to one drawing. It would mean going back to the planning document, new technical documentation and a new permit, with everything that implies for the schedule and for the loan.
That is why the gap between the two demands is practical as much as legal. Full relocation of the route is not a decision the city can take on its own. Sinking the line deeper on one section is a design change, and one that can at least in principle be discussed without stopping the whole job.
The city has offered nothing the residents will accept so far, and the calendar shows the pace picking up: three blockades in one week, then a second municipality on Friday, then the roundabout on Saturday.
Saturday evening in Nis
The blockade of the Maxi roundabout runs from 6 to 7 p.m. The same evening, at 7 p.m., a commemorative gathering is scheduled outside the Basic Court in Nis, marking 21 months since the canopy collapse. One gathering ends at the minute the other begins.
