When Ingrid Reinhart had finished her plea for a speed limit on Gabriel-von-Seidl-Strasse, there was brief applause in the Hubertus-Lindner-Saal. Last but not least, the wish of the Greens municipal councilor to have 30 km/h on all streets in Grünwald “except for the two main traffic arteries” was well received by the almost 40 visitors, who gave the meeting of the management committee on Tuesday evening an unusual atmosphere. Mayor Jan Neusiedl (CSU), however, was not amused and stated that such expressions of approval were “not permitted” at the meeting.
They didn’t help either. Although the Christian Social councilor Barbara Portenlänger was absent from the meeting, the CSU majority in the committee was enough to reject the concern from the citizenship with six to five votes – which specifically meant that no traffic planners were commissioned to examine a continuous speed limit of 30 or 40 kilometers per hour on Gabriel-von-Seidl-Straße. This repeated concern, which is now supported by almost 200 citizens, fared like other motions in the matter of traffic calming and securing the route to school, which were made at the public meeting in October and referred to the management committee.
The motion to extend the 30 km/h zone on Kaiser-Ludwig-Strasse was also rejected by the CSU by a vote of six to five. On the other hand, the negative decision was unanimous on two other points: the general desire of a citizen to have better security for the school routes in Grünwald was recognized as understandable, but on the one hand some improvements have already been made and the situation is generally not considered dramatic estimated. This is also supported by the accident statistics – no accident in the past three years involving a primary school student – and the assessment of the police. The request for traffic calming in Perlacher Strasse and Wörnbrunner Strasse, combined with a 20 km/h request, was unanimously rejected.
“There isn’t as much traffic there and there isn’t as much racing as we thought.”
The debate about the situation on Gabriel-von Seidl-Straße was more controversial – numerous residents find this unfavorable, especially for cyclists and pedestrians. When they rejected the universal speed limit, the administration and police referred to the legal requirements of the road traffic regulations and argued that measurements had not provided any statistical support for this. Grünwald police chief Andreas Forster explained: “There is not as much traffic there and people are not racing as much as we thought.” Accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians have not happened in the past three years.
Fabienne Unterreiner from the regulatory office referred to the traffic calming concept from 2008, on the basis of which all residential streets had been converted into 30 km/h zones. However, Gabriel-von-Seidel-Strasse has the function of a collecting road for which case law does not provide for a 30 km/h speed limit.
Ultimately, neither Reinhart’s appeal to take the wishes and concerns of the residents into account (“We should all have enough brain power to manage that”) nor Achim Zeppenfeld’s (SPD) or Tobias Brauner’s (PBG) references to Tempo 30 as a “preventive measure ” to introduce. Gerhard Sedlmair, among others, emphasized on behalf of the CSU that he could not go along if the right-before-left rule also applied to the current priority road at 30 km/h and explained: “50 km/h was already there before some people moved there . And a collecting road is called that because the traffic is supposed to collect there.”