“You have a lot of traffic in Gräfelfing.” That is the unsurprising conclusion of the traffic planners who created the overall traffic concept and presented it to the municipal council on Tuesday. Perceived truths – such as the chaos on Bahnhofstrasse caused by heavy traffic, or the mega traffic jam on Pasinger Strasse at peak times – have now been cast in a set of figures. This completes the first step in the overall traffic concept. The guideline workshop on February 9th is likely to be more exciting, when the municipal councils will formulate their vision for transport in Gräfelfing in a special session.
The pandemic has significantly delayed work on the traffic concept. Workshops in which citizens, entrepreneurs and schools dealt with the traffic situation in Gräfelfing only took place last autumn. After two years of work, the 166-page set of figures is finally complete, including citizen and business surveys as well as accessibility analyzes and traffic counts.
Traffic planners now confirm what Gräfelfingen people experience every day: Bahnhofstrasse is the traffic hotspot par excellence in the community. 920 cars are counted there per hour, “that’s a high load,” stated Alisa Picha-Rank from the Obermeyer engineering office. The car share in the central shopping street is 75 percent, only 15 percent are bicycles and five percent of citizens come on foot. The further away you are from the town center, the higher the proportion of cars in total traffic.
The Bahnhofstrasse is the focus of the accident statistics
The Bahnhofstrasse does not only suffer from car traffic. The sidewalks are often crowded with billboards, chairs and tables or bicycle racks and are therefore too narrow, so that pedestrians have to use the cycle lane, which is not ideally integrated into the sidewalk anyway. And on top of that, delivery trucks tend to park on the sidewalk more often. The main area in the accident statistics is Bahnhofstrasse.
Billboards, chairs, trucks, but also bicycle racks take up too much space on Bahnhofstrasse.
(Photo: Catherine Hess)
One thing may have come as a surprise in the traffic analysis: There is no shortage of parking spaces in Gräfelfing, not even on Bahnhofstrasse. Because the Gräfelfinger operate “parking lot hopping,” said the traffic expert. Many drive from shop to shop on Bahnhofstrasse, using five parking spaces within two hours. “If they couldn’t find a parking space, they wouldn’t do it.” On the other hand, many people in Gräfelfinger don’t even know the centrally located underground car park under the community center. It’s only about 40 percent full.
The Gräfelfingen actually have the best prerequisites for reducing car traffic: Tobias Kipp from the mobility consulting office Teamred, which is also involved in the analysis, calculated that it takes about 20 minutes to walk from large parts of the community to the town center – with the exception of the industrial park. “Walking is a good means of transport”, this should not be forgotten in future planning. You can also find “ideal conditions” by bike: you can be in the center of town from the outskirts in ten minutes and in half an hour you can be in the state capital. However, in some places there is a lack of good cycle path connections. There is also a wide range of bus and train services. However, participants in the online survey criticized its unreliability.
The focus is now on the guidelines that the municipal councils have to develop and which are decided by the municipal council. Concrete measures can then be derived from them in order to direct and optimize the flow of traffic in Gräfelfing. The completed catalog of measures should be available in September 2022. Citizens can read the results of the inventory on the municipal website.