Close your eyes and think of a traffic light, what do you see? Green, yellow, red? Or rather the FDP, Greens and SPD, who are at each other’s throats or pointing fingers at each other: “The others started it!” Traffic light, that’s no longer a normal word, that’s a situation and a very critical one. It probably won’t be long before you ask how things are going in the relationship and you’ll get the answer: “Total traffic lights.”
Maybe the traffic light will make it into the youth word of the year: “Don’t turn the traffic light like that, dude.” Maybe there will soon be an entry in the dictionary “traffic lights – synonym for kindergarten-like behavior”. What is pretty certain is that anyone who really wants to talk about a traffic light, i.e. the thing that regulates traffic, will have a hard time. So just to clarify: If this is about the traffic light crisis in Regensburg, then it’s about real traffic lights. They are currently leading to critical conditions in the household because they generated almost 680,000 euros in electricity costs in 2023, more than three times as much as in the previous year. Quite a chunk.
There was no other option, say the city and energy supplier Rewag. Unfortunately, when they bought the electricity in 2022, the energy crisis was at its peak. Why didn’t they buy electricity earlier, like they did for private households? Apparently a very special service for large customers. According to Rewag, they wait until the very end in order to achieve the lowest possible prices. A strategy that didn’t work so well this time.
There would be a way to drastically reduce energy costs by as much as 89 percent if only all traffic lights were equipped with LED lights. On its homepage, the city praises the switch to LED in the highest tones. But there’s one thing she doesn’t explain there: why of the 190 traffic lights in Regensburg, only eight have LED lighting.
How do you get out of these traffic light crises? The traffic lights in Berlin simply have to be abolished, some say, meaning new elections and thus more democracy. In Regensburg, on the other hand, abolishing the traffic lights would probably end in chaos. Here it would be more appropriate: dare to have more LEDs.