Vratislav Filler leavs AutoMat for two years: how does he assess 15 years of work in Prague?

In the Sustainable Urbanism Laboratory (LAB) of AutoMat, he will be replaced from January 2026 by a new team member. In recent years, Filler worked at AutoMat part-time. For roughly two years he will now devote himself fully to his second job at the Research Institute of Geodesy, Topography and Cartography, where he was recently given an exceptional professional opportunity. He does not consider his departure from the AutoMat team to be permanent and will remain a member of the association.

For nearly 20 years, he has worked at least part-time on the development of pedestrian and cycling transport in Prague. As a symbolic farewell for the next two years, we conducted an interview together in which we reflected on the past years and also asked what his new work will involve:

What does it feel like to take a break after nearly 20 years of “fighting” for more sustainable mobility?

I really needed it. At AutoMat I always worked part-time so that I wouldn’t, so to speak, “go crazy,” though in reality I was giving it much more. From COVID onwards, however, it stopped working very well for me. You probably noticed it—fewer authored articles on Městem na kole, less activity around Cyklisté sobě, and more areas where I eased off. After all these years, I feel I’m entitled to something of a break. After all, the “lifespan” of a LAB head is usually around five years, and I held a similar position there for three times that long.

What led you to this decision?

They were small reasons, but there were many of them. With COVID, the Cyklisté sobě community fell apart—a community where I wanted to connect active people and insiders—and it wasn’t possible to rebuild it on the same scale. In the meantime, things have been happening elsewhere: there’s Bike Kitchen, Critical Mass, and AutoMat is working on the Zero Challenge (Výzva Nula), where many active people meet. But I myself stayed on the sidelines, mainly for availability reasons. So some things I tried to build sort of fell apart. The community that I consider an important root of what AutoMat does in cycling transport is now different and slightly elsewhere. And in LAB I didn’t quite have the support that cultivating people in this way was necessary.

I also think I reached a professional peak when, in LAB, I built a kind of miniature design office. We learned how to do simple projects for contraflow cycling and sidewalk legalizations, we use our own methodology for observing cyclists—all of this we achieved in the past two years. But suddenly I didn’t really know how to push it further.

On top of that, I stopped feeling that the team actually wanted me to keep pushing things forward. For many years I had the exceptional position of being the public “voice” of AutoMat, which increasingly clashed with my role as a manager and eventually ceased to be desirable. Additional internal misunderstandings also contributed to this.

The main reason, however, was that in the spring I received an offer at my second job, the Research Institute of Geodesy, Topography and Cartography. I decided to use it as an opportunity to take a time-limited—though very long—leave from AutoMat.

What will you be doing over the next two years at the research institute?

I process precise satellite measurements from global navigation satellite systems—GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, and others—collectively referred to as GNSS. We also process measurements from a different space-geodesy system, DORIS, using the so-called Bern GNSS Software, which is developed by the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern. Together with a colleague who leads DORIS processing at our institute, we modified the Bern software for DORIS, but our version is not compatible with the official one.

In 2028, the GENESIS satellite will be launched, which will measure all the fundamental techniques of space geodesy simultaneously. As a result, interest in combined processing of GNSS and DORIS data is growing significantly. My task will therefore be to incorporate our DORIS extensions into the official version of the Bernese software so that data from both systems can be combined. Since this will require many consultations, I’ll be traveling to Bern quite often. So I promise I’ll bring back some field reports as well.

What will you miss most about working at AutoMat?

The men and women of Automat. Being in the office every day with such great people, almost all of whom are significantly younger than me—mentally as well, so to speak. I’ll have much less contact with people now. In Pecný, there are usually about five of us regularly in the building, on a hill a kilometer outside the village, and that’s it. And then the city itself. I won’t be going into central Prague nearly as often as I do now, when our Automat office is just a short walk from Náměstí Míru.

What do you consider your greatest achievement over those 15 years in AutoMat, Městem na kole, and related projects?

That AutoMat is respected by most people within municipal structures. From the time I led the LAB as a watchdog, I steered it in that direction—I tried to produce well-founded, professional outputs that could, if possible, also serve other experts at City Hall and elsewhere. Even though we’re not exactly popular with some politicians, we are essentially firmly established as an independent expertise roadblock against transport populism, which unfortunately some politicians use as an elevator to power.

We don’t really have anything spectacular where we could say: look, there was some threat here and AutoMat—or even Filler personally—saved the day. Perhaps the most visible thing was around 2017, when we defended cycling access in central pedestrian zones for so long that subsequent city administrations no longer reopened the issue. But that was teamwork. We’ve done a lot of work that improves things here and there. The concept of calming Smetana Embankment and Malá Strana, which City Hall later drew inspiration from; comments on the City Ring Road, on the Metropolitan Plan—often accepted. Research, analyses, and some contraflow bike lanes and legalizations in the field, of course.

At Městem na kole, I consider my greatest success to be that I brought it—still as Prahou na kole—to a stage where your predecessor Jirka Motýl could take it over and turn it into a real web magazine, now even a daily, Městem na kole. And that the cycling map is still alive, even though it’s almost twenty years old and we’ve somewhat neglected it over the past ten years.

How has the topic of sustainable mobility in the Czech Republic evolved over those 15+ years?

I think it can’t really be separated from how other topics are discussed in the Czech Republic. For a long time, the situation was mildly positive in the sense of “slow progress within the bounds of the law.” For example, at the level of strategies, it was possible to fix mistakes in Act No. 361, the state had a solid cycling strategy from 2013, the first sustainable mobility plans emerged, and Prague set a long-term target of a 7% cycling modal share. Around 2020, however, things started to fall apart a bit.

New national strategies, instead of taking a step forward toward integrating support for cycling across ministries, made a U-turn and dumped cycling onto the shoulders of cities. The Ministry of Transport washed its hands of cyclists; in practice, it now deals with them only through BESIP.

At the same time, though, many things are moving forward: cycling infrastructure is being built, 30 km zones and contraflow bike lanes have caught on, we have solid technical guidelines. Public pressure supported the introduction of mandatory side clearance when overtaking. We also definitely have broader and better knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.

Unfortunately, especially in recent years, the topic has become extremely politicized. Car congestion in cities is used as a hammer against sustainable transport, exploited by populists backed by big money. I think it’s much harder to get balanced coverage of these topics in the media than it used to be. For example, car emissions—stricter emission limits will apply from 2030, yet nobody talks about it. Overall, I feel we’re in a phase of an unpleasant kind of “capitalist normalization,” where oligarchs are essentially buying control over public opinion. Facts alone are no longer enough to “win” a measure in the media.

All the more reason, in my view, to have those facts and present them. Městem na kole exists precisely for that purpose, so I wish it many more successful years.

Thank you for the interview, Vráťa! Best of luck, and we look forward to your insights from Switzerland.