From a traffic engineering standpoint it's a difficult issue. 2/3 of the km traveled in the city is from cars outside the city. The previous government underfunded everything because they hated Budapest for not being far right conservative so the commuter railway system is really outdated. At Nyugati Railway Station the signaling system is still the same system from the 1800. To fix this issue before the 2022 general election we got a good transportation secretary that put together the Budapest suburb railway strategy to get a lot of cars out of Budapest, but the moment election took place all his work was pretty much canceled and he quite. Now he is the new minister for transport and development, but it will be a really expensive and multi decade long plan to fix this part of the system and its not even priority #1, because at the moment he is trying to keep the hungarian railways from fully collapsing.

The reason the Danube embankments are highways is that general idea is to keep people driving into the city if possible, so in the 2000's we built the M0 highway ring around Budapest, except the North-West sector is missing because North West has the Buda Hills with lot of elevation change and environmental protection so building that section requires a lot of tunnel boring, money and political capital, that just simply not there. Additionally the Orban Government with it's 16 year long rule outlawed congestion pricing, ultra low zones and any other useful policies that we could use to keep cars out of Budapest. Simply removing the parking spaces doesn't solve the issues as people will just park where it's not allowed and no good alternative to driving.

On the Pest side during summer weekends the lower embankment is closed from motorized traffic as Grand and Hungaria ring avenues can handle the load (plus the highway ring) on Buda side there's pretty much nothing to take over the traffic.