“Only ten minutes!” With these now legendary words, the then Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber advertised the Transrapid, which was to run between Munich Central Station and the airport in Moos. Nothing came of it. In the future, however, travelers will not be able to get from Munich to the airport quite as quickly as with Stoiber. The promise of the CSU member of parliament Florian Herrmann and his party friend, the mayor of Kirchheim Maximilian Böttl. The journey from Munich to the Erdinger Moos could then only take 15 minutes.
The prerequisite for this is an extension of underground line 6 from Garching into the district of Freising. The Freising district council has been campaigning for this project for years. Now, in the run-up to the state elections in October, the two CSU politicians are pulling it out of the drawer in which it rested, at least after the negative result of a feasibility study. The reason is probably obvious: Böltl would like to keep Herrmann company in the Bavarian state parliament from October.
“The extension of the U6 from the Garching research site to the district of Freising and Munich Airport is an important public transport project that deserves a re-examination! Together with Kirchheim’s mayor Maximilian Böltl, I am committed to it!” Herrmann writes on his Facebook account.
In a letter to the affected district administrators Helmut Petz and Christoph Göbel, from which the Munich Mercury cited, Herrmann and Böltl propose three alternatives. On the one hand, an extension of the U6 directly to the airport with a possible stop in Hallbergmoos. Or with a continuation to the airport community, where travelers could then change to the S-Bahn line 8. The 2020 feasibility study even gave the “Hallbergmoos variant” a negative value. A value of 1 would be optimal, from which subsidies flow.
The feasibility study rated the extension of the U6 to Neufahrn slightly better (0.11), where travelers would have to change to the S1 to get to the airport. And as a third possibility, the CSU politicians bring a direct connection into play, with an intermediate stop only at the Garching research center. Then travelers and professionals would be at the airport in fifteen minutes.
District Administrator Helmut Petz thinks the new initiative is a good idea
It may be that the new version of the idea of extending the U6 to the Freising district is due to the election campaign. However, when asked, District Administrator Petz recalled that the former Bavarian Minister of Transport, Kerstin Schreyer, had always rejected the request expressed by him and District Administrator Göbel with a categorical no. “A new political will now seems to be forming here: According to press reports, Minister of State Florian Herrmann considers this closing of the gap to be a good idea, and according to reports, the current Minister for Specialists, Christian Bernreiter, and the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder are also behind this idea,” he comments on the new initiative.
The methods of the feasibility study are said to have been outdated
Closing the gap between the Weihenstephan campus and the research institutions, the so-called science line, has been important to Petz since the 2020 local elections. And that’s not all: the northern part of Munich, with around 35,000 employees at the airport and around 70,000 passengers per day, could be connected to the Erdinger Moos much more quickly. This airport connection is highly attractive “and should definitely be implemented in the interest of the mobility turnaround”. This could motivate tens of thousands to switch from cars to public transport.
At the time, the experts from Intraplan Consult included the entire region up to Landshut in their calculations. Nevertheless, according to their calculations, the costs of a subway extension would be disproportionate to the benefit. And the Munich transport association was not convinced either: Only the residents of the north of Munich benefited from the extension. When the study results were published in the Freising district council, the accusation was raised that they had been prepared according to outdated criteria. They’ve actually been revised now. “A new method also calculates the economic benefit of the public transport expansion,” the letter says. Herrmann is certain that the extended U6 will be used by both students and commuters.