A few weeks ago, when the disaster on the second main line of the Munich S-Bahn could no longer be concealed, Bavaria’s Prime Minister put a big word into his mouth: transparency. “All the facts have to be on the table,” demanded Markus Söder at a crisis meeting on the billion-euro project, which is becoming more and more expensive and should be finished much later than planned. To the chagrin of many people in the greater Munich area, who often wait for the S-Bahn or are stuck in traffic.
In the meantime, however, more and more is becoming apparent: For years, Söder’s own government has lacked exactly the transparency that the Prime Minister is demanding from the state-owned company Deutsche Bahn, the builder of the second trunk line. The government’s responses to questions from the FDP and the Greens in the state parliament, as well as other documents, document how the Bavarian Ministry of Transport gradually realized that a debacle was imminent. But the city of Munich and the surrounding districts, which urgently need more and better local public transport, apparently found out absolutely nothing about this.
The highlight of the inglorious event was undoubtedly December 23, 2021. One day before Christmas, Munich’s Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD) and eight district administrators had a joint meeting with the Bahn Board of Management about the constant disruptions to the S-Bahn and its almost five-decade-old main line downtown complained. The fire letter was co-signed by Bavaria’s Minister of Transport, Kerstin Schreyer (CSU).
What the local politicians didn’t know at the time: While they were desperately campaigning for improvements to the S-Bahn and lamented a “loss of trust” among passengers, the next, much bigger problem had long been looming. Six weeks earlier, on November 11, 2021, a group of experts brought in by the Bavarian Ministry of Transport had presented its latest calculations internally to the ministry. According to this, the second trunk route could only be completed in 2037 instead of 2028 as last planned. And cost 7.2 instead of 3.8 billion euros.
There were more than enough internal warnings
Schreyer apparently left the co-signers of the S-Bahn fire letter to the railway board in the dark. It was not until mid-2022, when the press reported on impending delays in construction and foreseeable additional costs, that the new Minister of Transport, Christian Bernreiter (CSU), made these figures public. The district administrators of the eight districts in the Munich Transport Association (MVV) then complained to Prime Minister Söder: “As we had to learn from the press on June 30, 2022”, Bavaria’s Ministry of Transport fears that the second main route will be “delayed by 9 (!) years”. . In view of the almost daily traffic collapse in the Munich area, this is a “sheer catastrophe”.
Schreyer’s successor, Bernreiter, is now trying to explain verbosely, in an answer to a question from the Greens parliamentary group leader Ludwig Hartmann, why the ministry was hiding these figures. The repeated findings of the group of experts commissioned by the ministry were “rough estimates”. These estimates were “at no point in time for the political decision or the public discussion” a substitute for missing data from Deutsche Bahn.
But that doesn’t explain why at least the city of Munich and the districts in the MVV were not informed about the looming debacle. In addition, Bavaria’s Ministry of Transport has been warned for years, as Bernreiter has to admit when asked by the Greens and the FDP MP Sebastian Körber. Since May 2019, the ministry has consulted the five-strong group of experts, who, according to the contract, can spend “up to 240 hours per working week” evaluating the second trunk route.
As early as December 8, 2019, the group of experts referred to a “possible delay” in the completion of the second trunk line. On April 28, 2020, the specialist group informed the ministry for the first time that the project could become significantly more expensive; with 5.2 billion instead of 3.8 billion euros. Transport Minister Schreyer informed her CSU colleague and then Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer on October 7, 2020 “about a possible postponement and possible cost increases”. And on December 23, 2020, the Ministry of Transport informed Söder’s government headquarters, the State Chancellery. The costs could rise to 5.2 billion euros, the commissioning of the second main route could be postponed from 2028 to 2034. So there was more than enough internal warning.