When people are supposed to part with something they love, value or are used to for many years or decades, it hurts. It takes a lot of persuasiveness and, if necessary, a little pressure to get them to do so. Even if there are very good rational reasons. The coalition of the Greens and the SPD wants to cause Munich residents such pain. You should do without your own car, the feeling of being able to take the key at any time, get in and drive off. Whenever and wherever. This renunciation of at least perceived personal freedom, or comfort, is called the traffic turnaround in politics.
A clear majority of the city council is aiming for this, some radically, others more gently, most quickly. There are good reasons for it. But how, when and whether the turnaround will succeed at all is still open a year after the change of government in the town hall. Only one thing emerges in a very specific way: Nothing will happen quickly.
There is a lack of an overall concept, there is a lack of money, there is a lack of capacity in public transport, the necessary means of pressure are lacking, and in large parts there is also a lack of willingness on the part of the people. Especially with the last, important shortcoming, there is also a lack of a clever, psychological strategy of the green-red urban policy. The traffic turnaround is not a project of a very excited bicycle lobby in Munich, it means a fundamental social upheaval. Many Munich residents support this in principle, otherwise they would not have voted out black and red and made the Greens the strongest parliamentary group in the town hall. But when such a painful upheaval knocks in their own everyday life and pushes in, many notice that they could still wait outside. Or maybe start with the neighbors.
Of course, there are also the people of Munich who are full of enthusiasm and joy in their personal traffic turnaround or who do not need one at all because they live a life without a car and with clean means of transport out of conviction. There is also a new generation in which a driver’s license and own vehicle are no longer so important. However, some politicians like to assume that the feeling of loss or renunciation only exists in the tunnel view of the car lobby or of the CSU and FDP. A sober look at the statistics is enough to see how big the task of a traffic change is.
In 2020, when Munich took the ecological turnaround in the town hall, the number of passenger cars in the city rose to 740 244 according to the Statista database. The slight increase over the years roughly corresponds to the population growth, so you can’t go on a shopping spree Talk about petrol or diesel. However, one thing can be deduced: Hardly anyone was prepared to do without their own vehicle in 2020. The last reliable figures on the distribution of Munich’s traffic were published in 2019 according to a federal survey. A third of the journeys in Munich were therefore covered by car, with a slight downward trend. Bicycle traffic and public transport increased. However, if you look at the kilometers covered in the city, a total of around 60 million per day, the car share is still over 50 percent.
Although many of Munich’s residents know that forecasts see their city in a permanent jam in 2030. Even though they know the air needs to get cleaner. Although they may enjoy the new division of the street space with more bike paths or even pub gardens in parking lots.
Politicians should therefore have a very sophisticated plan if they want to move forward (quickly). The new mobility officer Georg Dunkel recently presented the new mobility strategy 2035 to the city council. Some people were hoping that the big hit would come. But after reading it, one has to find sobering that Dunkel only presented the draft for the theoretical substructure, as traffic planners envision the turnaround. The mobility strategy is divided into 19 (!) Sub-strategies that have yet to be worked out, which in turn are summarized in five clusters. One notices quickly: This is where someone starts very fundamentally. And one suspects: It won’t be quick. The theoretical substructure should not be finished until the second half of 2022.
However, the goal of the referendum “Sauber so i” from 2017 is very courageously adopted: By 2025, “at least 80 percent of the traffic in Munich’s urban area should be made by emission-free vehicles, local public transport, and pedestrian and bicycle traffic”. According to the current state of affairs, urban policy would probably not have to achieve a traffic turnaround, but a traffic miracle.
But how is the coalition going to get people to turn their lives around in such an important area as mobility? And best of all from now on? With carrot and stick.
The problem with the city is that until now it has not been able to provide enough sugar or wield a really effective whip. But it already knows what both could look like: it has to attract people with cheap, reliable, comfortable area-wide local transport, it has to expand cycle paths and offer pedestrians more. Significantly higher parking fees are being discussed as leverage, including for residents, or a city toll. However, the legal requirements of the federal and state governments are still missing for both. But at least something could happen here: When it comes to parking, the Free State could change the guidelines in autumn so that noticeable increases are possible. And in the federal government, a change of government in autumn with the participation of the Greens could also change a lot.
That could at least reduce another obstacle from Berlin, which is having a fatal effect on the traffic turnaround: the chronic underfunding of local public transport. This will and must be the backbone of every traffic turnaround, the well-versed traffic experts in the city council agree on this. But the outlook for the next five to ten years is bleak. Not only is there a lack of money, even more dramatically due to the Corona crisis, there is also a lack of well-advanced, really effective expansion projects.
Only one new tram line should go into operation by the end of this legislative period in 2026 (western bypass). The city council would like a whole network of more new lines, but they are still buzzing through the air like a mirage. With the expansion of the subway, things are getting even worse. Because there was hardly any planning or construction for decades, it will be well into the 2030s before the network can be noticeably relieved. The completion of the second main line of the S-Bahn, which the Greens consider useless anyway, is approaching the next decade due to rescheduling and construction delays. The only quick option would be to expand the bus network over a large area. A few extra lanes for shorter travel times are on the way, but when the Munich Transport Company looks to the 2022 program, expansion and deletion were roughly in balance.
How little the green-red coalition itself believes in a rapid expansion of capacities, it had to grudgingly admit in the city council. The opposition asked for a 365-euro ticket to be introduced for all public transport users in Munich by 2023 at the latest in order to create an incentive to switch. Although the Greens and Social Democrats generally like this idea, they had to reject it. You can neither pay the costs nor provide the necessary capacity in trains and buses.
For these dry prospects, parts of the Greens and the bicycle lobby in particular are starting to swing the psychological whip at motorists quite aggressively. If you follow the posts on social media and sometimes also in the city council, you get a guilty conscience when you drive to the recycling center. In addition, parking spaces that have been dismantled or converted into host terraces are literally cheered.
The fact that their own electorate, some of whom still own and use their own car, pollutes the air and builds frustration when they circle around the parking lot, does not seem to have arrived in view of the long time until the next local elections. It was also due to personal animosity in the coalition when the SPD parliamentary group leader Christian Müller was accused in February that the Greens were ruled by “blind car hatred”. But it didn’t happen for no reason.
The traffic turnaround will only succeed if you also include people who want to continue to own a car, even if, on closer inspection, they of course have to admit that it is much more expensive than it looks on the surface. Car sharing has so far only worked to a limited extent, and electric cars, which have not played a major role so far, will not emit any exhaust gases when driving, but still need lanes and parking spaces. And there are actually many car owners in Munich who are already making many, and in the future, possibly even more, trips by bike, on foot, or by bus and train, thereby contributing to the turnaround in traffic. While this species has not suffered as well, it makes up a large part of the population, and neither it nor its vehicles will disappear anytime soon due to harsh criticism or head-in-the-sand. Residential underground garages in new building districts will not be enough as an offer.
The people of Munich also want to cycle more and more safely, which is what they have expressly stated in their cycling decision. But that is especially true when the sun is shining. Anyone who has driven to work on a rainy December morning immediately notices how lonely it can get on bike paths. Nothing works without better developed local public transport. And after the pandemic, you don’t even know whether it would bring much. Nobody can say whether Munich residents and commuters from the surrounding area will ever squeeze into S-Bahn and U-Bahn as tightly as they did before the Corona crisis.
The turnaround in traffic will drag on for even longer than many hope and some would lead us to believe. So that the many people who are ready to do so, but are not committed to conviction, do not completely lose courage and desire on the way, a little less psychological whip and a little more empathy would be a good start.