For ten years the city council swore that the basic requirement for the construction of a new district in the north-east of Bogenhausen was a tunnel in which the railroad tracks between Daglfing and Johanneskirchen had to disappear. Indispensable, it was said. Not negotiable. If the railway insists on expanding the line from two to four tracks at ground level, legal action will be taken if necessary, if only to protect the residents.
In the meantime, slightly different tones can be heard from the administration: “From a purely traffic point of view,” writes the planning department in an undated draft resolution, the railway tunnel is “not a condition for the secure development and the structural start of development in the northeast”. In plain language: You can start even when the trains are rolling above ground. This harbors the risk that the interim solution will ultimately become permanent. Instead of a lively residential area, a kind of exclave would be created beyond the rails, isolated in an island location on the outskirts.
The arguments for the turnaround of the administration are provided by the design with which the Rheinflügel Severin office and BBZ landscape architects won the ideas competition for the project. The architects propose to gradually build individual city blocks on the almost 600 hectares, starting with section A, an area of around 130 hectares north of Daglfing and west of the Hüllgraben, the majority of which is now largely agricultural land already owned by the city. Dense development and a swimming lake are planned there. Thereafter, up to seven more modules could be gradually built, depending on how many people are to live in the quarter – 30,000 if the planning department has its way, a maximum of 10,000 if the residents prevail.
U4 and tram lines are to be extended
A compact first building area with good public transport connections into the city – the extension of the underground line 4 from Arabellapark and the tram lines 17 from Oberföhring in the north and 19 from Berg am Laim Bahnhof in the south: This would allow the city to expand Decouple the planning department from the rail tunnel, at least for the beginning. The big problem of the project is the transport connection to the city center: the railway line is an obstacle in the way. The lecture emphasizes that the tunnel is “expressly the solution requested by the state capital of Munich,” which will continue to be advocated. The architects’ idea “justifies an urban development that could start largely independently of the tunnel construction”.
Because it is also unclear when what will be built: The first building permit for the residential area will probably not be granted until 2025 at the earliest, after which the modules will be built successively over a period of around 20 years. The start of construction for the tunnel, however, if the city can push it through at all, cannot yet be foreseen; the construction time is estimated at twelve years. And according to the current situation, Munich would have to pay the additional costs of 1.5 billion euros alone.
The fact that the interim solution without a rail tunnel could also become a permanent one can be seen from the ideas for the road network. The main development should run from south to north, in the south via Landshamer and Riemer Strasse to the Passau autobahn (A 94) and in the north via the district road M 3 to connect to the autobahn ring (A 99). Existing residential areas should be burdened as little as possible, says a spokesman for the planning department. To the west, in the direction of the center, there is only talk of a “supplementary connection”, that is, car underpasses under the railway line.
The streets are already full
There are already two of them, on Stegmühlstrasse and Johanneskirchner Strasse; they would have to be expanded and lengthened if the railway line did not end up underground. Two more could replace the restricted level crossings at Daglfinger and Brodersenstrasse, and the “additional connection” to the west would already be completed, but at the same time this new district with up to 30,000 residents would largely be detached from the urban road network.
However, there will be car journeys in the neighborhood, even if the underground and tramways run at short intervals. In the recently completed, also car-poor Prinz-Eugen-Park in Oberföhring with 4500 residents, the coordinators speak of a good 4000 journeys per day – despite the tram connection and mobility concept. Extrapolated, this would mean 9,000 to 26,000 car journeys per day for the new city district, depending on the number of residents.
The streets that are supposed to take on this traffic are already full, and traffic jams in rush hour traffic are the norm. According to the Munich District Office, around 20,000 vehicles are on the road every day on the M 3 district road – the connection to the north. Because of its supra-local function, it will even be upgraded to a state road in 2022. And on the A94 in the south, in 2015, the last year for which official figures are available, around 62,000 vehicles were counted daily between Steinhausen and Riem, an average that, according to the data from the permanent counting station in Riem, only fell significantly in the Corona year 2020.
The planning department has not yet given any figures. First of all, preparatory examinations were in progress. Later there will be a traffic report, “from which traffic figures and further details will emerge”.