This is how it should look when the subway arrives in Martinsried. But nothing will come of it before 2026.
(Photo: Stefan Amann/architecture2brain)
The construction of the subway to Martinsried is delayed again. The groundbreaking ceremony was actually planned for this summer at the latest. It will probably not come to that. The project management company’s most recent status report from the end of 2021 states that the contract for the main construction work will be awarded in August 2022: “From this point in time, preparatory measures can be initiated. That is almost a year later than planned. The commissioning of the route with the timetable change for 2025/26 can no longer be maintained, the planners are now aiming for completion in mid to late 2026.
It is another chapter in the almost never-ending story of the extension of the U 6 to the campus in Martinsried. The subway was actually supposed to go into operation in 2017. It was only with the establishment of a project management company that all difficulties between the Free State, District of Munich, MVV and the municipality were cleared out of the way. The costs rose from an initial estimate 20 years ago of around 70 million euros to around 170 million now.
The tree felling has called the conservationists on the plan.
(Photo: Catherine Hess)
Even if construction is a long time coming: 300 trees and bushes for almost a thousand meters of subway line have now been removed. The deforestation campaign between the Klinikum Großhadern and the Martinsried campus has ended for the time being. From April onwards, the rootstocks of the trees are removed. Trees that were only planted around 15 years ago were felled on an area of 40,000 square meters. The Bund Naturschutz (BN) is now complaining about the felling procedure and, above all, that “the wood is simply disposed of,” as the chairwoman of the Würmtal-Nord group, Mawina Andrassy, says: “One would have the wood wonderfully as dead wood for the others trees in the forest,” she says and criticizes “that apparently no one has thought about saving one or the other tree”.
A building in harmony with nature?
The BN therefore calls on the subway builders to “take a closer look” at the next major project in the immediate vicinity – the connection from Gotthardstrasse to Pasing station. There are also very old trees there. Of course, Andrassy says they are also in favor of building mass transportation, but: “Every tree felled is one too many.” Peter von Schall-Riaucour, municipal councilor and member of the BN, also thinks that when building the route over the next few years, one should “always question whether everything is done as harmoniously as possible with nature”. Klaus Volk, a local resident who has been critical of the underground planning for years, asked the Planegg municipality about the use of the wood and was told that “digging out is not economical”. The trees were “expensive tree nursery trees” and “we should have acted more sustainably,” says Volk.
The fact that the trees had to be removed so widely is due to the fact that an open construction method was decided for the 980 meter long route. The open construction is cheaper. The aisle now cut along the footpath from the clinic to the campus is 15 meters wide, and the excavation pit will be at least as wide. In line with the overall project, the first concrete construction measure – a new parking deck at the Biomedical Center (BMC) – is also delayed. The completion, planned for autumn 2021, also failed due to delivery problems for building materials. Now the parking deck is to be opened in spring.
The parking deck for the subway is under construction. But it doesn’t finish as planned.
(Photo: Catherine Hess)
At the groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of the parking deck in May 2021, District Administrator Christoph Göbel (CSU) was pleased, with a view to the first subway journey for the 2025/2026 timetable change, that the overall project, which was first discussed in 1990, is now “on schedule ” may be. Science Minister Bernd Sibler (CSU) praised the upcoming U6 as a “science line” that will commute between the university locations of Garching in the north and Martinsried in the south and will connect the “technologies of the future”. Now everyone has to be patient until the opening.