Mali: Construction of Depot for Subway Trains to Start Soon

The construction of the depot in Makis, where the subway trains will be parked in the future, is to begin in several weeks, the minister of finance of Serbia, Sinisa Mali, pointed out on TV Happy, as reported by the Vecernje Novosti daily.

This short announcement by the minister of finance regarding more concrete works within the Belgrade Subway project is not the only one lately. The president of the temporary organ of the City of Belgrade, Aleksandar Sapic, said at the end of last year that the excavations on the route of the first subway line would begin in 2024. At the beginning of December, he pointed out that the construction of the boring machine for the establishment of that line had been commissioned. Previously, in November 2023, Sapic pointed out that, in the second half of 2024, concrete things would become visible regarding the construction of the subway system.

Recently, let us remind, the conclusion on giving approval to the Secretariat for Utility and Housing Affairs and the Belgrade Land Development Public Agency for the signing of the agreement with the Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure and PowerConstruction Corporation (PowerChina) on the regulation of the mutual rights and obligation regarding the design and construction of the roads and utility infrastructure in the Makisko Polje, Phase I – LOT 1 and LOT 2 – was on the agenda of the Temporary Organ of Belgrade.

As for the dynamics and the pace of the construction of the subway, it was precisely Sinisa Mali, but in the capacity of the mayor of Belgrade, who announced the beginning of the construction of the subway system at the beginning of his mandate for 2016, only to have that optimistic deadline moved to 2018, then to the end of 2019, and then to the beginning of 2020. As the reason for this date-guessing, he said that the initial projections had been given based on “inadequate data from the time of the previous authorities.”

In the meantime, Aleksandar Vucic, the then prime minister, revealed precisely in the autumn of 2016 that the first subway line should connect the Makisko Polje-Karaburma route, and that the second line should become the one that had been considered the first for decades, the Zemun-Ustanicka Street route. The was a total U-turn, precisely because, after four decades, the idea of the first line which would cross the river Sava was abandoned. It soon became clear that the first one was certainly to connect Makis and Mirijevo, and the second Zemun and Mirijevo, that they would intersect not at the Republic Square, as had been planned for decades, but at the new Sava Square. In the summer of 2017, the city presented the Traffic Master Plan and claimed that the subway service would become available three to four years from the beginning of the construction, so, roughly in 2023.

The not-to-be father of the Belgrade Subway, the architect and urban planner Branislav Jovin was strictly against that kind of an approach to planning and, until his death in 2018, he had not wavered from his vision of an independent rail system – a subway for a city of up to two million residents, which would be built from the center in the first phase, with new lines toward the periphery being added later.

The current plan for the subway system has been criticized by a sizable portion of the public as well for several years now. The biggest criticism pertains to the fact that the first line bypasses several points in the city’s core and that the two lines intersect at the Sava Square and not at the city center itself. Furthermore, one of the biggest criticisms leveled at the current subway project is that its first two lines bypass the Prokop rail station (whose connection to the subway network is planned only with the third subway line) and the University Clinical Center of Serbia.

Ministarstvo finansija Republike Srbije

Ministarstvo građevinarstva, saobraćaja i infrastrukture Republike Srbije

Grad Beograd-Sekretarijat za komunalne i stambene poslove Beograd

JP Direkcija za građevinsko zemljište i izgradnju Beograda

PowerConstrustion Corporation of China

PowerChina

Siniša Mali

Aleksandar Vučić

Aleksandar Šapić

Branislav Jovin