ALREADY SEVEN STATIONS OF METRO LINE M4 HAVE THEIR COMPLETE PACKAGES OF LICENCES
As is well-known, Budapest Mayor István Tarlós had initiated in the summer of 2013 at the competent government authorities that the licensing procedures, particularly the completion certificate procedure, of Metro Line M4 should be accelerated in order to be able to complete the Project on time. In order to foster this, the government appointed Dr. Imre Pesti, the head of the Government Office of Budapest as per Government Decree 308/2013. (VIII. 15.) to coordinate the permission and licensing procedures of the various authorities as extraordinarily significant cases.
On the initiative, the National Transport Authority drew together the various licensing procedures, which has accelerated and rationalized the process. On the basis of the former procedure, the various equipments of each station, the escalators, lifts, drainage ducts, fire-detector equipment, water-fog fire extinguishers, ventilation system, would have each had to undergo a separate licensing procedure. In the case of Bikás park (Tétényi út) station, this would have meant 4 separate procedures involving 48 requests to different competent authorities and having to conduct 4 site inspections. Instead, there was a single procedure at the station with 12 requests to competent authorities for the award of its completion certificate.
In the case of extraordinarily significant projects, the solution, which is used by several countries throughout Europe, merged the 300 licensing procedures of the project into 13 (ten for the stations, one for the tunnels and the related objects, tracks, power-supply and signalling equipment, and two others for the depot). In the case of a station, a procedure includes, beyond its completion certificate, obtaining the licences for the related road network, sewer and drainage systems at the surface. In the end, all these make up the complex procedure.
The several hundred members of the staffs of the organizations mentioned have cooperated in this complicated procedure involving several hundred various partial procedures (site visits, inspections, authorizations, and resolutions etc.), as a result of which 9 stations now have the completion certificates issued by the National Transport Authority and 7 stations have obtained the full packages of the licenses needed. This means that over half of the stations have now obtained the surface structure completion certificates from the Budapest Government Office, the traffic permits for roads and streets, the sewer licenses from the Middle-Danube-Valley Inspectorate for Environmental Protection, Nature Conservation and Water Management and the water permits from the Middle-Danube-Valley Waterworks Authority.
Apart from the stations, the tunnels with their related structures, the tracks, power-supply and signalling system also have to obtain the completion certificate; this can be issued only with the successful completion of the commissioning tests now underway. It is important to note that DBR has had to obtain two major licenses for the M4 depot at Kelenföld. One is for the turn-out of the M4 depot tracks to the main Hungarian railways tracks, and the other for the mechanical equipment of the depot. All in all, 90% of all the required permits and licences for the new line have been issued by the middle of January 2014. Practically, the permits for the surface structures and roads of Keleti Railway Station, the road network of Móricz Zsigmond körtér station and the licence package for the Kelenföld Railway Station remain to be obtained, but they are under way.
BKV Zrt. DBR Metro Project Directorate
Photo by Dávid Nyitrai, BKK