2023-05-08 19:17:53
The sight is quite unusual. Instead of cars and trucks, a hundred bicycles circulated on Sunday May 7 on a section of the German capital’s motorway. These cyclists were demonstrating against the federal government’s projects, presented at the end of March and formalized in the Council of Ministers on May 3, aimed at extending the country’s motorway network.
A total of 144 sections will be built, renovated or widened in order to “fluidify” traffic and meet growing traffic needs.
Projects “of greater public interest”
Stamped “overriding public interest”, these projects will benefit from an accelerated administrative procedure. Nonsense for these demonstrators gathered on the Berlin A100. “We are calling for a moratorium on all highway projects, launches one of these militants. With climate change, the transport sector must reduce its CO2 emissions. But it is not with more roads and the maintenance of an old-fashioned transport system, based on the whole individual, that we will get there..
The project creates strong tensions even within the government. Carried by the Liberals of the FDP and by its Minister of Transport Volker Wissing, the text had great difficulty in passing to their coalition partners the environmentalists. However, this party had to bend in the face of liberals weakened in the opinion polls and determined not to let go on a unifying theme within a part of the population.
Difficult transition from theory to practice
“The Germans and the political class support climate goals in principle, but when it comes to implementation, everything becomes much more difficult. We see it with the issue of motorways, speed limits on motorways, the ban on combustion engines,” observes Markus Friedrich, a specialist in transport issues at the University of Stuttgart.
According to him, by taking up these themes, the FDP speaks to a wider population than just its electorate and it scores points. “In any case, we see here that the federal government is not seeking to change the behavior of Germans on transport”he points out.
Although these motorway projects have been mentioned for about ten years, the Liberal Minister of Transport justifies their implementation with new forecasts according to which individual road transport will continue to increase by 7% between now and 2051, and even 54% for the transport of goods.
“We have to adapt our infrastructures”, he recently explained, recalling that Germans buy more online, which generates more road traffic. “Those who do not want new roads want a deindustrialization of the country”, he added.
The question of alternatives
To those who criticize him for implementing projects mentioned at a time when the law against climate change was not yet validated – it has been since 2019 – the minister assures that more motorways will mean fewer traffic jams and therefore less CO2.
A position that Markus Friedrich does not share “To say that more roads are good for the environment is wrong. We will never build enough roads capable of reducing traffic congestion. It’s utopian. Moreover, Volker Wissing’s motorway projects will not be sufficient in the face of the forecast increase in road traffic. We would have to have the courage to ensure that these forecasts do not come true, through measures other than the construction of roads. »
Single train ticket at €49 per month
Indeed, the poor performance of the German transport sector is regularly exposed. It is one of the few, with the building, not to come close or far to its CO2 reduction objectives for 2030 and 2045. Volker Wissing has still not presented an emergency plan in the material as had been announced.
If this clash between liberals and ecologists was foreseeable, the Greens gave in to “to move forward” on other topics. Thus, environmentalists have obtained a vast investment plan in the railway of 43 billion euros by 2027 and the establishment, on May 1, of a single train ticket at 49 € per month, valid throughout the territory, excluding fast trains. Give-and-take certainly usual in this parliamentary system but which creates its share of frustrations, in particular with the environmentalist base.
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