It was a full-bodied promise that the district politicians sent out six years ago: In the not too distant future, according to the message of the district councils at the time, cyclists should get comfortably and, above all, quickly on the first cycle expressway in the Free State from the Munich city limits to Garching and Unterschleißheim. District Administrator Christoph Göbel (CSU) and the district council broke this promise: Not a single meter of the Radl-Autobahn is finished yet. Even more: five years after the big announcement, it has still not been finally clarified on which route the cycle expressway in Garching should be built. Politics failed.
The mobility turnaround cannot succeed in this way. Of course, this is also due to the fact that approval procedures and planning generally take too much time in Germany. And so it can be seen as a positive message from Berlin that the new traffic light coalition wants to change precisely this in order to be able to implement projects such as cycle superhighways more quickly. But that doesn’t change the fact that the district – like the state capital, by the way – has allowed far too much time to pass. The first concrete talks with the city of Garching should have taken place in the initial planning phase in order to find out exactly where in the city a rapid cycle path could be implemented. Instead, abstract feasibility studies were made that had absolutely nothing to do with the conditions on site and are now gathering dust in the drawers of the district office.
On November 30th, the Garching city council should decide which route it would like to have. In a sense, this date represents the serious start of the actual implementation of the project. As I said: after five years. The district has to be chalked up for having dragged off the project without need and doing the urgently needed mobility turnaround a disservice.