Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) is undeterred in continuing a tradition that all CSU department heads have stood for since 2009. The road is given significantly more priority than rail. Strictly speaking: the Autobahn. Wissing’s announcement that the A 8 would be widened to eight lanes from the Munich-South junction to the Inntal triangle clearly illustrates that the liberal did not even begin to understand what a future-oriented, compatible and sustainable transport policy should look like. Especially on the eminently important transit route from the district of Munich in the direction of Brenner and Salzburg, the railway would have to be strengthened and expanded – also in order to reduce the traffic load on the left and right of the motorway in the long term.
However, it is not the case that in the future – as the Greens would prefer – no new roads should be built or existing routes should be extended. There are projects that make perfect sense, such as expanding the eastern bypass of the A 99 from six to eight lanes. This is absolutely necessary to allow traffic to flow more or less on one of the busiest motorways in Central Europe. And the fathers of the A 99 wisely thought ahead decades ago and planned an inward extension of the autobahn; as a result, the area taken up by the additional lanes is kept within tolerable limits. An expansion of the A 8 from the Munich-South junction to Rosenheim represents a disproportionately large intervention in nature, which cannot be justified by anything – precisely because there is an alternative. And that consists of massively expanding the rail infrastructure in order to shift freight traffic from the roads to the rails.
Above all, it is thanks to the CSU transport ministers Ramsauer, Dobrindt, Schmidt and Scheuer that nothing has progressed on this topic for years – especially not on the northern approach to the Brenner Pass. In Tyrol, this very important route is already a developed high-speed route, while the trains trundle through the Bavarian Inn Valley on almost antique-looking tracks – and the trucks are stuck in traffic on the Inn Valley motorway. There you can marvel at the priorities set by the Federal Minister of Transport.