In this zone, no commercial vehicles that run on fossil fuels will be allowed, although some diesel cars will still be welcome until January 1, 2027 or 2028. Privately owned vehicles will still be allowed on campus until January 1, 2030, but not after that, and the situation for motorcycles is still very unclear.

In itself, these are of course good ambitions for a metropole like Eindhoven. However, TU/e doesn’t seem to be prepared for them. When I drive my car onto the premises in the morning, De Zaale is completely packed out with diesel vans. Vans that were smoking the entire drive here (and the owners walking to the construction site are also smoking, but that’s beside the point). During the day, large trucks supply the construction site with all kinds of materials.

A fast license plate check on https://doehetzero.nl/kentekencheck/ reveals that most cars will be allowed on the premises until 2027, but a sizeable portion of them won’t be as of this January. Finally, some peace and quiet. From this moment on, the construction workers will have to park outside the ring road and walk onto the premises “with a cart or something” (according to the Groenlinks party in Haarlem, where they also have such a zone). Fortunately, we have a nice parking lot on Celebeslaan and you can easily take a cart onto the campus via the bike path through De Berenkuil.

And how about TU/e’s own fleet? Security guards drive electric cars, but the fire department doesn’t. And our company truck (the blue one) will soon no longer be welcome on campus either. Fortunately, student rowing association Theta is located outside the ring road, so their boat truck won’t need replacing, but the truck of our robot football team TechUnited will. And what about the cars of study and student associations? The electric vehicles that we build ourselves can of course stay, but their support fleet, well, we’ll have to park that outside the campus I think.

I’m really hoping for the future residents of Gemini that the building will be completed before the construction works are forced to leave.