Those who read that headline might, if they are old enough, and their musical taste runs (or ran) that way, detect the first stirrings of an old earworm.
This one to be precise. From Kraftwerk.
Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn . . .
To be fair, the band went on to record tributes to a train and a bicycle race, but none (to me) ever equaled that great hymn to the Autobahn, rebuilt and extended, a symbol of West Germany’s economic miracle and of the freedom of the road:
Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal
Die Sonne scheint mit Glitzerstrahl
Fast forward nearly 50 years, and the story is somewhat different.
From Jörg Luyken’s The German Review:
An interesting debate is raging behind the scenes in the German government at the moment. While on the surface the subject is banal — how much money to invest in asphalt — it actually tells us a lot about two strands of thinking clashing at the top of German government.
Germany’s government is a somewhat unlikely coalition between the center-left Social Democrats (a party that has, traditionally at least, drawn support from the industrial working class), the Greens, and the economically liberal (by European standards) Free Democrats.
And when it comes to the Autobahn, the coalition is divided.
Luyken:
On the one hand you have the ideology of ‘choice if good’ represented by the liberal Free Democrats. They control the Transport Ministry and are pushing for a multi-billion euro investment in modernising and extending the country’s autobahn system.
Their logic goes something like this. The more disposable income that Germans have had over the decades, the more that they have decided to spend it on owning their own car. Put simply, a car gives people more choice: they can travel further to shop, they can travel further to work, and they can travel further to visit friends and go on holiday. All good things.
According to the Free Democrats, government’s primary aim is to respond to these desires by building the infrastructure that facilitates them. Ergo, invest in keeping the autobahns as the envy of the world.
Moreover, the better the roads are, the easier it is to transport goods across long distances. That’s good for German industry and good for consumers. . . .
Sounds good to me (shocking, I know), but the Greens are not onside (shocking, I know):
Luyken:
On the other side of the debate you have the Greens who agree that spending money on roads encourages people to drive. It’s just that they see this as a bad thing. Studies show that more roads you build, they more people use cars, something that pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at dangerous levels.
What’s more autobahns are noisy, ugly things that tear through beautiful landscapes.
According to the Greens, the government’s primary aim should be to control people’s choices. People should instead be encouraged to travel by train, or to travel less in general — and buy locally. . . .
Those last two sentences are worth noting. Sometimes, I think that the Green agenda is more about control rather than about the environment, but that, of course, is an unworthy thought.
Luyken:
These opposing views [of the FDP and the Greens] mean that the government has been unable to pass a key new piece of legislation that is supposed to make good on its promise of modernising the country after the stagnation of the Merkel years.
The stagnation of the Merkel years. Stagnation. Well, yes. We’ve come a long way from the time when Merkel, the leader of the free world we were told (even if she didn’t like the term), could do no wrong.
Luyken:
All three parties in the ‘traffic light’ coalition agree that they want to cut bureaucracy to kick start public infrastructure projects.
The Greens insist that only ‘climate friendly’ infrastructure like wind turbines and solar parks should classify as being in the “overriding national interest” and therefore largely freed from old planning procedures.
But the Free Democrats insist that new stretches of autobahn ought to also be classified as such. A modern road system is key to securing German wealth in the coming decades, they say.
Luyken reports that Chancellor Scholz is staying neutral for now in the interests of coalition harmony, although he is thought to side with the FDP on this issue. But then again, his party is committed to encouraging more people to take the train. Climate targets and all that.
Luyken:
In 2019, Germans travelled some 900 billion kilometres by car and just 180 billion by train, according to statistics compiled by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The haulage situation is hardly different. Some 4.8 billion tonnes were transported in lorries in 2019 compared to less than half a billion on the tracks.
Add to that the fact that the state already invests more in maintaining its rail infrastructure than what it spends on its much more heavily used roads and another easily ignored truth becomes apparent: more rail usage inevitably means higher costs of transportation.
In other words, hard economic realities make it almost certain that the autobahn system is going to remain the key pillar of Germany’s infrastructure plans for the foreseeable future.
Then again, Germany is not so dedicated to hard economic realities as it once was.
The pending price tag for future-proofing the country’s energy system is projected to amount to over $1 trillion by 2030, according to BloombergNEF. The costs include investments in upgrading power grids and above all new generation to manage the phase out of nuclear and coal plants, handle increased demand from electric cars and heating systems, and meet climate commitments.
If that’s “future proofing” (never change, Bloomberg) then tearing off a house’s roof and replacing it with a tarp is weatherproofing.
Bloomberg again:
The transition will require the installation of solar panels covering the equivalent of 43 soccer fields and 1,600 heat pumps every day. It also needs 27 new onshore and four offshore wind plants to be built per week, according to a wish list presented by Chancellor Olaf Scholz during a recent visit to Volkswagen AG’s headquarters in Wolfsburg.
That’ll work.