Munich shows once again what is going wrong with major projects in this country. Politicians look on helplessly as costs explode, Deutsche Bahn botches plans. The turnaround in traffic will never succeed like this.
comment by
Heiner Effern
The state of Bavaria now has a construction scandal – like the often mocked Berlin with its airport. The expansion of the Munich S-Bahn network with a second, seven-kilometer-long tunnel under the city center is currently running out of control, both financially and in terms of time. The costs are expected to double from 3.8 to 7.2 billion euros. The construction period is to be extended by nine years and last until 2037. This may incite critics of the major project and opponents of the allegedly omnipotent Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) to malice. However, the problems of the Free State as the client also contain a completely different dimension: the expansion of local public transport stands for the mobility of the future, the airport in Berlin for the locomotion of the past.