Changelog

The page listed the city's parking regulations once under each of the car parks — the same twenty-word line, ten times. The car parks now share one line that gives the date and still links every source behind them.

What a landlord may ask for and what people are really paying now show as widgets on the town page, not just cards — three weeks before September, when most kots change hands.

Today's air over Leuven, hourly, in plain language — and why there's no low-emission zone here. Read against the European model, since no monitoring station sits inside the city itself.

Parking Teken, at Gasthuisberg, was missing from the car-park list even though the page already mentioned it as one of the four randparkings with a free De Lijn bus ticket. It's weekend-only (Friday evening to Sunday), unlike the other three.

The city's recurring festivals in the order they next come around — Leuven Jazz, the Innovation Beerfestival, Beleuvenissen, Hapje-Tapje and the car-free Autovrije Zondag on 20 September — each linking to the organiser's own page to confirm exact dates.

About one in five KU Leuven students comes from abroad, Leuven is repeatedly named the most expensive city centre in Flanders to rent in, and almost everything governing a kot or a flat here is published only in Dutch. Two new tools take the two halves of that. What They Can Ask You For Before You Get the Keys is the rules, with the money worked out from whatever rent you type. The deposit ceiling is three months' rent on an ordinary lease and two on a student lease, and it may never be paid in cash. Registering the lease is free and is the landlord's job. Beyond rent, a student lease may carry only water, energy, telecoms and — if the contract says so — the second-residence tax. And the one almost nobody is told: if you sign a kot and then cancel before it even starts, that is free with three months' notice and two months' rent with less. Every rule links to the Flemish page it comes from. What People Actually Pay to Rent Here asks the question the first tool refuses to guess at. Sign in and add what you pay for a kot, a studio or a flat — and the monthly advance for costs, which is what makes two identical rents different. The board shows the middle figure of recent reports, once a few people have reported the same kind of place. It launches with no official benchmark beside it, on purpose. The averages that circulate for Leuven are either Flanders-wide figures for a different kind of housing or a single unchecked number, and putting one of those next to real rents would mislead more than it helps.

The town page now opens with a drawing of the late-Gothic town hall and its tiers of statue niches, seen across the cobbles of the Grote Markt with bicycles parked along the far side.

Pick where you are going and it gives you the car park to aim for. Then type your street and it tells you whether you may drive in, whether you may park, and when — 98 streets across the pedestrian zone, the no-entry streets and the autoluwe zone, copied from the city's own lists. The cameras have been on since 2020 and each zone you enter without access is a separate €58 fine. Also, plainly: Leuven has no low-emission zone.

The next departures straight from the NMBS/SNCB board, including the platform currently posted and a marker when it has been moved. It carries the thing that catches every newcomer: almost no train to Brussels says Brussels on it — they show Oostende, De Panne, Charleroi — so you read the time and the platform instead.

Leuven has had research and registered tools since early this morning, but two of them referenced code that had never been merged, so the town sat waiting. Both are built now, and Leuven opens with four tools: a live train board, a guide to driving into a centre that is genuinely hard to drive into, the Ecowerf bin sorter, and the newcomer contacts.