"Voice of  the People is Heard" party criticizes Yerevan mayor`s  proposal to ban the use of personal vehicles in the city to prevent  congestion

ArmInfo.Vanik Nikoyan, founder of the "Voice of the People is Heard" party, created by the "We are Against" civic movement, criticized Yerevan Mayor Tigran Aviyanan's proposal to ban the use of personal vehicles in the city in order to address congestion in the Armenian capital.

A statement received by ArmInfo noted that this decision is an act of  pressure on citizens. Nikoyan noted that public transportation prices  were raised despite the insufficient number of buses, unscheduled  routes, and inconvenient stops. "It's not enough that you raised  public transportation prices; now you want to force people to use  this expensive transportation every day by banning private cars," the  party founder lamented.  He also indignant at the fact that Yerevan  Mayor Tigran Avinyan continues to justify traffic jams with the guise  of "increased economic activity," while, in his view, the cause of  the congestion isn't the wealth and car ownership of the city, but  the lack of proper city governance. In this regard, he questioned  what the city's municipality has done in recent years to encourage  citizens to choose public transportation for comfort, rather than out  of coercion.

"You can't decide for citizens when, where and how they will travel.  The issue lies not with citizen behavior, but with your ineffective  governance model. Yerevan wasn't congested with cars; it was  congested with your indecisive political decisions. And no matter how  you try to portray this as a 'digital solution' or 'smart  governance,' the fact remains: people are once again held hostage to  your mistakes," Nikoyan concluded.