The cancellation of the 2025 Mobility Congress decided by the Munich City Council has been sharply criticized by various environmental organizations. Munich’s civil society was “shocked” by the decision, wrote the Federal Nature Conservation Association, the Isarlust Association and the Munich Sustainability Initiative Alliance in a joint statement: “The automobile industry rules in Munich.”
The congress has so far taken place twice as part of the International Motor Show (IAA), which moved from Frankfurt to Munich in 2021. According to the plans of the mobility department, next year’s congress should be separated from the IAA scheduled for September and relocated outside the Bavarian summer holidays in order to generate more attention. November was suggested as a possible period. However, at the request of the government factions of the Greens/Pink List and SPD/Volt, the congress was initially suspended for 2025 and the subsidy for a planned large pilot project for the transport transition was canceled.
For 2027, the city council should at least deal with the organization of the congress again. “It’s not about crushing it forever,” assured Green Party councilor Gudrun Lux. Both groups cited the city’s strained budget situation, which required savings, as the main reason for the cancellation decided on Wednesday. In this case, it’s almost a million euros, of which 300,000 euros were budgeted for the previously unspecified major project. Various small and medium-sized transport projects from private, civil society alliances will continue to be supported, but to a lesser extent. There should now only be 120,000 euros for this.
The Greens themselves initiated the mobility congress in March 2020. The intention was to conduct “a critical and constructive dialogue” under the leadership of the state capital and to “rethink urban mobility in a completely new way,” as the application at the time said. The IAA organizers announced at the time that they wanted to develop their event from a pure car show into a mobility trade fair. This should also be made clear with the new name IAA Mobility.
“In view of the budget situation, we have to set priorities, and in this case the weighing up was really painful,” said Gudrun Lux: “The mobility congress is a green baby. But we want to send a signal: we save even where it hurts us.” Her city council colleague Andreas Schuster from the SPD assured that the money saved would not disappear somewhere in the city budget, but would remain in the transport sector.
There, for example, it could be used to better equip summer streets or projects such as the pedestrian zone on Weißenburger Strasse: “People are much more aware of what the traffic turnaround is all about on their doorstep.” In this sense, Lux also called for understanding: “If we have to decide, then measures that directly affect the citizens always have priority.”
Leave out theory, but enable practice and change things in concrete places, that’s how you should understand the motto of the town hall coalition. Thorsten Kellermann, the board member of the Munich district group in the Association for Nature Conservation, sees it differently: “The euros saved cannot be used to finance a cycle path.” For him the message remains: “The transport transition is going, the IAA is staying.”
Andreas Schuster contradicts this assessment: “My impression is that the mobility transition does not depend on this congress.” In any case, there was no pressure from the auto industry; by 2023 at the latest it was accepted that the mobility congress was about working together, not against each other. The green-red push for cancellation, which only the ÖDP/Munich List and the Left/The Party did not follow in the committee, was “not easy,” emphasized Schuster: “We didn’t do it with joy.”