There is a lot of time to think in traffic jams. About the meaning of life, public transport – and how it could come to this.
The rediscovery of slowness is a phenomenon of this hectic, sometimes hysterical time when many people feel driven by job, family or leisure stress. And there are many ways to slow down: they range from doing without luxury to more conscious travel and healthier eating. But it also happens that you unintentionally take the path of deceleration. Like the tens of thousands of commuters who got stuck in a traffic jam between the Chinese cities of Jining and Huai’an for several weeks a few years ago. The more than 30,000 cars in the mega sheet metal avalanche progressed only a few meters per day. Anyone who is slowed down in this way has a lot of time to think about their own life and the meaning of being – or to get really upset.
Commuters in the city and district of Munich do not yet have to equip themselves with emergency packages for traffic jams lasting several days. Nevertheless, the city has once again collected an inglorious title this week: Munich is Germany’s traffic jam capital, ahead of Berlin and Hamburg. Commuters spend an average of 74 hours a year on congested roads here. But the residents of the state capital cannot claim this title exclusively for themselves – they have to share it with the residents of the district of Munich. On the one hand, the boundaries between the city and the surrounding area are fluid, so it’s no feat to spend several hours on the Föhringer Ring in the morning and cross the city and the district at walking pace. A trip from Berg am Laim to Pullach can also take a long time if nothing works on Candidstraße at the Giesinger Stadium, as a result the convoy at the zoo is moving slower than the elephants in the zoo and at the latest in the Isar valley there is a standstill. In addition, more people commute from the city to work in the district than vice versa. No traffic jam capital! The real honor belongs to the county.
If you are stuck in traffic on the A 99 near Schleissheim, with a view of the roofs of the Olympic Park and the Olympic Tower, you can ask yourself why the city and the Free State were able to place such monumental buildings in the landscape and create a then unique, ultra-modern S -to build up a railway network – but why this has hardly been expanded in the half century since then and why it is a daily annoyance for tens of thousands of commuters today. Part of the answer is: CSU prime ministers and their transport ministers would rather smuggle billions in budgets into black constituencies than into red-green Munich, and for a long time SPD mayors had little or no interest in the surrounding area. That’s how it all piled up.