Berlin’s Efforts to Reduce Driving Stalled by German Car Culture
While Germany’s capital has made progress in building bike lanes and restricting traffic, national political shifts show that automobiles still reign supreme.
Cyclists in Berlin in May. The city has expanded its active transportation options in recent years.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/BloombergBerlin may have an international reputation as a green, bike-friendly city, but debates currently playing out in the German capital suggest that, for many residents, the car is still king.
In February, the conservative Christian Democrat Union party became the largest party in Berlin’s state assembly, following a campaign that championed the rights of motorists and targeted the capital’s “transport chaos.” This was a break from the outgoing left-leaning city government, which had been a longtime advocate of public transit and active travel.
Even before the February elections handed a win to the pro-car camp, Berlin had struggled to reduce car dependency. Last November, a court ruled that a car-free stretch of the major shopping street Friedrichsstrasse would be reopened to motorists, and in March a proposal to eliminate almost all parking spots in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Graefekiez this summer was revised to cut only 400.
Berlin may be Germany’s least car-dependent big city — its 2018 modal split of 26% for motor vehicles was notably lower than the next lowest, Hamburg, at 32% — but it’s also the capital of the nation that invented the gas-powered automobile and pioneered the modern superhighway. German car ownership rates are above average among European Union states, and its auto manufacturing sector is one of the largest in the world: Companies like VW, BMW and Mercedes-Benz directly employ over 750,000 people across Germany.