There are a lot of groups on the seniors portal Facebook that mourn the past, which isn’t really surprising given the medium in question. Thousands of users (without *insiders, they don’t like to do that very much) exchange ideas on sites called “Hintertupfinger back then” or “Kleinweilersheim in old pictures” or something similar.
There are also sites like this for Munich. And it’s often about how beautiful it all was 50, 60, 70 years ago – when pedestrian zones weren’t so crowded because, firstly, there weren’t any and secondly, they weren’t even needed.
Back in the good old days, people parked their cars decoratively in traffic jams between Marienplatz and Rindermarkt. The chrome gleamed and the exhaust fumes were the scent of the free world. Today’s Facebook user, perhaps also a nostalgia bot, reflexively comments on this with “oh, there was still something going on in the city back then.”
Unfortunately, this idyll is long gone. At some point the city was bold enough to block cars from parts of the city center. Despite all the love for cars, the outcry at the time was limited. And there weren’t that many people who resisted the expansion of local public transport as if it were a problem.
Today, in times of the Nimby mentality, things are different. Nimby stands for “not in my backyard” and describes a type of person who has difficulty dealing with changes in their environment.
There are a lot of Nimby people, Nimbys for short, in Munich. Whenever something is being built near them, they come out of the woodwork followed by their lawyer and wave the petition form. They become particularly active when the living space of cars is to be restricted. If something stinks, it’s not the exhaust gases from outdated diesel engines, but the fact that they’re no longer allowed to blithely blow them into the air.
As car owners, Nimbys don’t need such nonsense like trams or traffic-calmed streets without parking spaces. Their political home is with the CSU, which interprets the abbreviation as “not in my Bavarialand”.
By the way, Munich’s Ober-Nimby B. sits in Bogenhausen and for the CSU in the state parliament and presents himself as a brave fighter against high-rise buildings, trams and so on. The fact that others might find this good doesn’t matter to him. And that he ever for even his most loyal voters consider it to be a rumor.