When the Isental motorway was opened two years ago, the Altöttingen District Administrator Erwin Schneider (CSU) went crazy. Three young men had dared to disrupt the celebration on the Fürthholz Nord motorway parking lot. They unrolled banners on which they complained about the A 94 as a “colossus against the climate”, “destroying living space” and “devastating the landscape”, and they chanted, “No reason to celebrate!” District Administrator Schneider shouted back that the three were “Grattler” and “Inhuman”. Schneider’s attempt to justify these insults, which cost him a fine seven months later, was aimed at ensuring that the A 94 would put an end to a depressing grievance. The many and often serious accidents on the B 12 federal highway would henceforth be a thing of the past, and that was certainly a reason to celebrate.
The fact that critics of the Isental motorway were repeatedly accused of dead and seriously injured people on the B 12 until the very end was always as stupid as it was vile. The terrible expression manslaughter argument acquired a particularly infamous connotation in this case. The resistance against the Isental motorway was always directed against a route decision that was in many ways unreasonable, but never against the prevention of more traffic safety.
Evening traffic on the A94 just before Dorfen: The commuters on the way home are happy not only to make faster but also safer progress than they used to on the B12.
(Photo: Renate Schmidt)
The autobahn makes the lives of road users safer – and that’s a good thing. Two years after the Isental Autobahn was opened, police data show that the Autobahn has met these expectations. There are also accidents on the Isental motorway. A 33-year-old man was seriously injured in an accident between Dorfen and Lengdorf on Tuesday. But the accident statistics show one thing very clearly: All in all, thanks to the A 94, fewer accidents occur, fewer people are injured and fewer are killed.
Perhaps the strongest number first: not a person has lost their life on the A 94 since the opening of the new line between Heldenstein and Hohenlinden. In the almost two years before that, up to and including September 2019, eight people had died in several accidents on the B 12 between Heldenstein and the Hohenlinden A 94 junction.
During the same period there were 90 accidents on the aforementioned B 12 section, in which 173 people were injured. In the two years since the Isental motorway was opened to traffic, 57 accidents occurred between the Heldenstein and Hohenlinden junctions, in which 88 people were injured. Since then, there have been no more deaths on the B 12 federal highway, which of course has been considerably relieved by the motorway, and 38 injured in 27 accidents.
“The aim of a motorway is that there are no accidents in oncoming traffic.”
A motorway is safer than a simple main road because of one difference, says Alexander Huber, press spokesman for the Rosenheim Police Headquarters: “The aim of a motorway is that you do not have any accidents in oncoming traffic.” With the exception of wrong-way drivers, there are no head-on collisions on a motorway, as the lanes are separated in two directions.
In the years before the Isental motorway was opened, traffic on the B 12 highway was so dense that dangerous overtaking maneuvers were the most common cause of serious accidents, confirm the heads of the Waldkraiburg and Ebersberg police station, Georg Deibl and Ulrich Milius. “The B 12 was suffocated by traffic,” says Deibl, “and not everyone has understood that it makes no sense to overtake in traffic in a queue.” In Deibl’s area of responsibility, there are almost 22 kilometers in the Mühldorf district to the border with the Ebersberg district. Deibl’s Ebersberg colleague Milius points out that it was even worse on the B 12 in the 1990s and 2000s. For years they have worked on increasing safety on the federal highway, for example cutting trees on the side of the road and defusing curves. That had also brought something, the road safety had been “significantly improved”. But with the opening of the Isental motorway, the situation has changed radically again. “Up until recently there were several main accident areas,” says Deibl, “but they are no longer there.” Milius confirms this for the Ebersberg section: “We also have no more accident black spots.”
On the A 94, the most common causes of accidents are excessive speed, dangerous overtaking, insufficient safety distance and errors when changing lanes. It’s like on any motorway, says Karl Höpfl, press spokesman for the police headquarters in Upper Bavaria North. Compared to the many other motorways in the region, the number of accidents on it is not at all noticeable. Or as Milius puts it: “The A 94 is a very good motorway that is easy to drive on.”