A rare occurrence happened on Zagreb’s hill today, as the road to the top was closed due to congestion near the top.
We can safely say that people of Zagreb really wanted to see at least some winter this year, and now that finally some snow and cold has visited us, a large number of people wanted to go “to the mountains” to enjoy it. And too large number of those decided to spend this lovely Sunday skiing, sledding or just walking around on the snow on Zagreb’s Medvednica hill, taking their cars up there.
There has been some snow on the hill for a while now, so even some weekends ago the crowd was too big, and too many cars were parked on the side of the (quite narrow) road, which made the experience of driving back to the city a quite frustrating one.
But this weekend it got even busier, and police were called to intervene and the first step was for the road maintenance workers to halt the up-hill traffic right at the beginning of the one-way road going to the summit (as shown on the photo taken today by a reader). That led to quite a large mess, because it was very difficult for people to turn their cars around and abandon their idea of going to Sljeme with their cars. That first step to shutting the traffic down happened sometime around 11 am, as the photo was taken around noon and it has been closed for a while at that point. While that jam was still in the process of clearing up, police blocked the road on the very beginning of Sljemenska cesta in Gračani, where it is clearly much easier to stop the up-hill traffic without causing additional car jams. We were not able to confirm when and if the traffic was open on the Sljeme road today.
So, many of those trying to get to winter joys on the mountain today weren’t able to get to the top, and when there are so many cars on the roads there sometimes even the regular organized bus service from tram terminal station Mihaljevac to Sljeme (which should go hourly on weekends) gets interrupted because the bus physically cannot get through.
We’re just left remembering how great it used to be way back when, when we still had the Sljeme cable car, so here’s to hope that we’ll see works on that starting soon and bringing us back the favourite means of getting to the top of our beautiful hill, as Zagreb mayor has repeatedly promised, but not much has been happening in terms of construction since those announcements.
