Bregenz in law: City loses dispute over secret pedestrian zone information!

Bregenz in law: City loses dispute over secret pedestrian zone information!

Bregenz, Österreich - The Constitutional Court (VfGH) has confirmed the legality of the new pedestrian zone in Bregenz, but the city has now been brought into the focus of the Administrative Court (VwGH) because of its poor information behavior. Bregenz had refused essential information on the background of the pedestrian zone, which the VwGH classified as illegal. According to the decision, the city had to provide relevant environmental information in May 2023, which complained of the pedestrian zone. However, Mayor Michael Ritsch (SPÖ) rejected this in September 2022, which caused the judicial discussion. Now the court made it clear that the city had to issue the required documents and bear the procedural costs, such as .

A parallel topic from Stuttgart illuminates the regulations for special use in pedestrian zones. Here the administrative court decided that a city can issue guidelines that differentiate between different types of special use. A retailer complained of the revocation of his permission to present the goods in front of his business, but the court rejected the lawsuit. The city of Stuttgart had issued new guidelines to organize the design of the city center and to keep the pedestrian zones attractive to the citizens. This regulation determines that presentations of goods are not allowed to protrude deeper than 1 m into public space, but the gastronomy is excluded, which represents another important aspect of urban design, such as .