My Classic Car Season 16 Episode 20 - GM Sports Cars
BUDAPEST, Hungary Gyorgy †Csanyi knows there are better cars on the road that his powder blue Trabant, but he is not ready to turn in his keys and start taking the bus.
I would certainly prefer a Mercedes, but that's what I got, said Csanyi, an unemployed electrician, I'm not saying it is the best car in the world but I love it.
Take the bus, or at least driving a better car, however, is that the city of Budapest would Csanyi and tens of thousands more Trabant owners to smoking, sputtering is manufactured in Germany Trabant , built with inefficient two-stroke engines are considered as the main culprits in the problem of the increasing pollution of the Hungarian capital.
Next month, the city officials present a program under which drivers Trabant and other East German model two-stroke Wartburg, will be eligible to exchange their cars for a pass transit more years or a reduction of 15 to 20 percent on a new, efficient Western model fuel cars collected in the program will be destroyed, with all the metal parts and recycled glass.
The two-stroke engines to Trabant and Wartburgs are similar to those in lawn mowers, chain saws and many motorcycles oil engines and gas mix in the combustion chamber, producing thick smoke that burns d 'oil.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Trabant loud chugging of the West German autobahn became a symbol of freedom However crossing the newly opened Iron Curtain Soon, they came to represent something far less desirable inefficient, polluting industries of the former Soviet bloc.
Trabant has become the target of many jokes, including popular in Budapest that the questions it is safer to cross the street in front of or behind a Trabant excess speed.
Trabant production stopped in 1991 and Wartburg production ceased last year Germany has gotten rid of most cars without a similar program, and both models now represent less than 2 percent of vehicles LA- low.
In Hungary poor, however, the problem is more persistent about 100,000 Trabant and Wartburgs crowd in the streets of Budapest, which represents about 15 percent of cars in the capital, said Zoltan Molnar, who oversees the city program Unlike other Eastern European countries, Hungary had no indigenous car industry before 1989, it had to import all its passenger car the past, most of this market went to East Germans.
While Budapest probably didnt the dirtiest air in the notoriously polluted region, city officials see getting rid of two-stroke engines as a relatively easy step to Hungarian television air clean air quality reports all days and 10 days last winter pollution the city was so bad that mothers were warned to keep their children inside.
Industrial pollution has declined over the past two years, but mostly because of the recession, said Robert Rakics, responsible for the reduction of air pollution in the Ministry of Environment of Hungary But traffic is growing and therefore Pollution.
Some days, the situation is critical, he said, rising to close her window the rumbling of hundreds of cars on the street below.
In addition to places 2 75 million this year to support the exchange program Trabant and Wartburg, the city and the Ministry of Environment also offer to pay half the cost of a catalytic converter for both Hungarian models with any type of car can get a tax and catalytic converter duty-free, and in 1995, imports of cars without converters will be banned Rakics said.
Although some objects to attempts to make Budapest an area without Trabant, some find fault with the part of the program that would replace Trabant with new cars rather than buses and underground pass not only Budapest overpolluted, they say, it is overtrafficked also in addition to the new freedoms of the post-1989 period came to both increased devotion to the internal combustion engine and more wealth to buy cars.
The basic problem with Budapest is that the number of cars has doubled in the last 10 years and all the roads pass through the city center, said director of urban traffic Balazs Arato.
Still fewer people use public transport, and average speed center traffic fell to less than 6 mph The city is to receive loans totaling $ 136 million from the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for improve the trams and metro and build a park-and-ride system for suburban commuters.
Yet no one thinks it will be easy to coax drivers of their cars With the advent of the advertising industry, cars have become as much a status symbol as in the West.
I know how harmful developed the Trabant is, but I can not afford another car, Dorottya Czuk, a student aged 21, said after shooting in front of the post office in his two Trabant doors And I will not use the public transportation is all there is to it.
Old East German Cars Cloud Hungary Progress, is German, cars HUNGARY.