The second S-Bahn tube, which Munich is so eagerly waiting for, will come much later than promised and it will be much, much more expensive than calculated. Politics and the railways have fooled people. High time to finally admit that.
Those who were born on April 5, 2017, the day of the groundbreaking for the second S-Bahn trunk line, can already drive through the tunnel with their own children when it opens. The construction of the ten-kilometre-long route, seven kilometers of which will run underground, is scheduled to last until 2037, an unbelievable 20 years. That is eleven years longer than originally communicated. Whether Deutsche Bahn (DB) already knew back then that they wouldn’t make it in nine years, they will probably never admit. And then there are the costs: a price increase of 80 percent to the – just as unbelievable – sum of 7.2 billion euros. If that’s enough! The new estimates do not come from bitter opponents of the main line tunnel, but from experts from the Bavarian Ministry of Transport, who are accompanying the project. They are therefore to be regarded as serious.
The DB itself only answers questions about costs and construction time with text modules. One checks, is in coordination, is in talks. Such a meaningless and now unbearable cliché has long been part of Deutsche Bahn’s communication strategy. In addition, there is a whitewashing that gradually becomes just embarrassing. Corrections to planning errors are glossed over as “optimizations”, when the project manager for the second main route stopped, it was said that the time for handing over the baton was good.
Everything good, everything nice? no way. The planners obviously underestimated the effort involved in building the tunnel and its three underground stations from the start. But criticism and doubts from outsiders, some of whom have been dealing with rail transport for decades, have been dismissed. Now the Free State, the federal government and the railways, but also their customers, are facing a debacle, as is already known from the Stuttgart 21 project (current status: six years delay) and from Berlin Airport BER (opening nine years later). It is therefore time for the railways to put the facts on the table honestly, they owe it to their customers.
For local public transport in the Munich area, the delay on the main route – be it eight or eleven years – is a disaster. The route was intended to relieve the unreliable S-Bahn system and allow for more frequent services. Many commuters can wait until they retire, but that doesn’t help the climate.
CSU Minister of State Christian Bernreiter now locates those responsible for this in Berlin and is demanding more money for the railway expansion. This is not much more than cheap party tactics. Because he is acting as if the predecessors of FDP Transport Minister Volker Wissing – all from the CSU for twelve years – had nothing to do with the misery on the rails, which extends far beyond Munich.