Whether this anniversary is a reason to celebrate is in the eye of the beholder: this Monday, March 7th, the old town ring tunnel will be 50 years old. The 600 meter long underpass, which connects Lehel with Maxvorstadt underground, is currently being extensively renovated. Since July 2018, the building department has been busy updating the old tube in terms of safety and fire protection.
The city council provided 84.7 million euros for the renovation. But a lot is done for this: In the middle, a dividing wall divides the tunnel into two separate tubes, so that in the event of a fire at least one direction remains smoke-free and it can serve as an escape route or access route for rescue vehicles. At the same time, the wall is intended to help stabilize the old tunnel ceiling. The technology will also be replaced: the lighting, the ventilation and the emergency call and fire alarm systems. The partition wall will also be extended to the entry and exit ramps, which is why one of the previous two lanes will have to be eliminated in the direction of Friedensengel.
Almost 85 million euros is a lot of money: But in the end there was nothing else to do: the tunnel no longer meets current safety standards. And if the renovation had not been decided, the tunnel would have had to be closed. But that was out of the question, even if it would certainly not be decided in this form today.
But the city cannot do without him just yet. Despite the declared departure from the car-friendly city, there are still huge numbers of cars in the city center. The daily flow of traffic with 60,000 cars between Prinzregentenstraße and Oskar-von-Miller-Ring has to be managed somehow. If the tunnel had now been dismantled and the traffic routed above ground, they would be added to the 35,000 cars that pass the intersection to Ludwigstrasse on the surface every day. The traffic chaos would be programmed.
Always construction work. The tunnel under Ludwigstrasse and the Prinz-Carl-Palais was expanded over decades.
(Photo: Marlies Schnetzer/SZ Photo)
This is the unfortunate heritage of traffic planning in the past. They wanted to ban car traffic from the immediate center, but also not too far away from it. At the time, the city administration saw no alternative to the old town ring tunnel. Because in 1967, when construction of the old town ring tunnel began, people were still in the mood for a car-friendly city.
The city development plan of 1963 even talked about the complete development of the center with city freeways – the Viktualienmarkt was to be largely sacrificed, the Lindau freeway should lead to the Sendlinger Tor, the Nuremberg freeway to the Hofgarten. An extra-wide Isar parallel was to be created on the Isar with partial building over the river. The city would have literally gotten under the wheels, but the plans ultimately failed due to resistance from the citizenry. However, the initiatives could not prevent the Altstadtring and the Altstadtringtunnel.
From 1966 onwards, a heated argument had broken out over the tunnel. The critics slandered the oversized portal as “hell’s gorge”, alternatively as “traffic folly of gigantic proportions” or “tombstone for Munich’s urban development”. They wanted to prevent an ugly hole from opening up in front of the Prince Carl Palace, which was completed in 1806 and served as the end of the urban plan for Prinzregentenstraße. And the western tunnel portal severely cut off the Maxvorstadt from the center. Pedestrians were banished to ugly underpasses, everything was subordinated to car traffic.
The tunnel also represents a turning point: decisions were questioned for the first time
the Southgerman newspaper, who also castigated the project in numerous comments and presented alternatives to the tunnel, observed an unprecedented protest at the time. For the first time, so the tenor, decisions of the city administration were no longer accepted as God-given, but critically questioned. Out of the protest grew the Munich Building Forum, which later became the Munich discussion forum for urban development issues and has been critically accompanying urban development since 1972 to this day under the name Munich Forum.
Ultimately, the protest was in vain. During the tunnel debate, Edgar Luther, the city planning officer at the time, said: “The time of 1806, when the Prince Carl Palace was completed, cannot be conjured back.” This was by no means meant to be cynical; in the vote on February 22, 1967, the city council approved the plans. What was realized was what was considered modern and necessary, despite all objections.
In 1970, the historic palace was placed on a three-and-a-half meter thick steel plate, and the basement was sacrificed. Luther’s successor, Uli Zech, called the tunnel at the topping-out ceremony on October 12, 1970 a “protective wall” that protected the heart of the city center from “being crushed by traffic”. The fact that the total costs for the project had exploded from 40 to 71 million Deutschmarks also brought heavy criticism to the building department.
New grey: Even after the renovation, the building will retain its charm.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
Apart from the tunnel, the entire old town ring, which stretches along the former city wall, is still a memorial to the car enthusiasm of the post-war period. In places the ring had grown to monstrous widths. In front of today’s State Chancellery, at that time the ruins of the army museum destroyed in World War II, a 45 meter wide, seven-lane city highway separated the Hofgarten from the English Garden.
Only in the early 1990s was this urban planning wound healed at least a little. Today’s Franz-Josef-Strauß-Ring was reduced from 41 meters wide to 15 meters, and the Köglmühlbach was partially uncovered again. The extra-wide aisle in Queen Street was drastically narrowed from 33 to five meters, and the newly acquired areas were added to the English Garden, which still has 8,000 square meters with plenty of space for new greenery.
When the current work on the old town ring tunnel, which was also known as the Prince Carl Palais tunnel, is completed, the west portal will also be redesigned. The ramp will be shortened so that it is also possible to turn off Ludwigstrasse onto Oskar-von-Miller-Ring. This in turn means that traffic in the direction of Maximiliansplatz no longer has to flow via Brienner Strasse, which can then also be closed to private car traffic.
Pedestrians should then also be able to cross the street above ground at the western mouth of the tunnel, with new planting a part of the city that was once planned, built up and hostile to pedestrians would at least be repaired to some extent.