When the Bavarian Green Party organizes an on-site meeting on traffic policy, they even take the train to a motorway service area if possible. The train journey from Munich to Kiefersfelden takes just under one and a half hours, then it’s a 20-minute walk up to the Inntal West service area. The truck drivers who meanwhile are stuck in traffic jams along the entire 25 kilometers of the Inntal autobahn and further back to the Inntal triangle on the A 8 can only dream of such a journey time. Because it is Monday, and when the Tyrolean ban on weekend and night driving for trucks ends at 5 a.m., the state government there is only gradually allowing trucks from Bavaria into the country. This block handling at the border near Kiefersfelden has long been a point of contention between Bavaria and Tyrol. If the Greens have their way, then there should also be a common solution to the common traffic problem.
Accordingly, the Bavarian Green parliamentary group leader Ludwig Hartmann, traffic spokesman Markus Büchel and the member of parliament Claudia Köhler, who is responsible for the Rosenheim area within the parliamentary group, express a lot of understanding for their Green party friend Ingrid Felipe, who came from the other side to the border in Kiefersfelden. Felipe is the deputy governor of Tyrol and within the state government is responsible for European transport issues and thus also for the controversial block handling. “Dosages”, as Felipe calls the block handling, are “only to the extent that traffic safety actually requires it”. They were only used to keep traffic flowing on the Inntal and Brenner autobahns through Tyrol to Italy, Felipe asserted on Monday, while Governor Günther Platter (ÖVP) has never made a secret of the fact that the constant dosing indirectly also intended to speed up the sluggish German planning process for two more railway tracks to the Brenner Base Tunnel.
This Tyrolean pinprick policy not only irritates business associations, freight forwarders and logistics companies, as well as the people in the Bavarian border region, who find it difficult to make headway on the autobahn on such mornings and have alternate traffic rolling past their front doors on the side routes. The Bavarian state government and the former Federal Minister of Transport, Andreas Scheuer, have always criticized the situation and threatened to sue. It cannot be that Tyrol is passing on its traffic problems with block handling to Bavaria, it was said in a resolution by the CSU parliamentary group at the end of January. Prime Minister Markus Söder once again doubted the legality of the measure. But at least in one respect, Söder sounds completely different since his party friend Scheuer no longer heads the transport department in Berlin, but has taken over the new traffic light coalition. Their new transport minister, Volker Wissing (FDP), recently asked Söder to “finally act now” and make truck traffic from Munich to Verona more expensive.
Tyrol has been demanding such an increase in the “corridor toll” for years. According to a study commissioned by the state government, the majority of the approximately 2.5 million trucks that roll over the Brenner Pass in transit every year do not take the shortest route across the Alps, but simply the cheapest. So that such detours are no longer worthwhile, a new regulation at European level should make toll surcharges of up to 50 percent possible for certain routes.
The Bavarian Green parliamentary group spokesman Ludwig Hartmann and the deputy Tyrolean governor Ingrid Felipe demonstrate unity in transport policy in view of the block handling near Kiefersfelden.
(Photo: Matthias Köpf)
In addition to Söder, who will travel to Vienna on Thursday – also on the train – to the new Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer (ÖVP), the Bavarian and Tyrolean Greens are also relying on this. “Real costs on the street” is what Felipe calls it, from Munich to Verona, because “that’s actually where living space is under pressure”. In her own words, she suddenly heard “completely new sounds”, because recently Scheuer and the CSU in particular had opposed it. The fact that something is happening right now is “interesting,” says Felipe, but she leaves further criticism of the Bavarian and German side to her local party friends.
“If it were the other way around and Bavaria had this truck pressure, they would do it the same way,” says Ludwig Hartmann about the state government made up of CSU and Free Voters. Green traffic spokesman Markus Büchler also sees “understandable reasons” for the Tyrolean block handling – in contrast to a measure that has been taking place here on the A 93, on the A 8 near Salzburg and on the A 3 near Passau since 2015 in the direction of Austria caused. “The real harassment are the entry controls over here,” says Büchler, who, as a “part-time Austrian,” says he often drives across the border and sees the controls on the trains as “completely superfluous.”
In any case, due to the mutual accusations, “above all, time was lost in finding a good solution at European level,” criticizes Hartmann and, as a further part of such a solution, names the need to “very clearly promote the access to the Brenner Pass so that freight traffic can move onto the rails is coming” – and if possible not only here in the border region, because elsewhere in Germany the autobahns are also too crowded.
Söder recently asked the federal government to push ahead with the planning. However, the high-capacity route planned by the railways, consisting of two additional tracks, has met with fierce resistance from the Bund Naturschutz and a total of 20 local citizens’ initiatives in the Rosenheim district alone. In contrast to the railway planners, they consider the two previous tracks to be sufficient. The Greens see themselves as in conflict with the BN and its chairman Richard Mergner, who, from Büchner’s point of view, is “on the wrong side” on this issue. For more climate protection you need the train and for the train you need tracks, says Büchler. Future numbers of trains shouldn’t be underestimated, on the contrary, they should be a goal.