WMD: Seeing how Germans get from point A to point B makes me want to cry. Efficient highways, small towns with modern electric trams, buses, downtown cores closed off for pedestrian use only, dedicated bike routes. Why, people wonder, can't we do the same? (One of the reasons we don't is because many of our cities, including Vancouver, grew up with the car and were designed to work with cars. And for awhile, it actually worked, until one day there were too many cars for the available roadspace. Meantime, we let out public transportation systems decline. Or in the case of Vancouver, we invested in hugely expensive rapid transit lines that arguably emptied the bank when it came to paying for other more accessible forms of public transit, such as buses, that have a farther reach.)
I don't know enough about the transit situation in Germany, which I assume has its own problems, except to say that the autobahn is fun; Germany is a great place to be on a bike; lots of people walk.
First the autobahn. Contrary to popular belief, it does have speed controls. While some of the time speed is unlimited -- and it's very interesting to be in a Volkswagen van going 150 k/mh and to be passed by BMWs and Porsches that sweep past you as if your vehicle was parked -- speed controls are enforced during certain traffic and weather conditions, at certain times of the day and when the highway passes a town. The latter limitation is apparently meant to cut down on traffic noise, not a concern that a cow or something will be run over. The speed limits are enforced by radar traps which apparently are a huge moneymaker for the government. The rules of the autobahn, which ran from two to three lanes on the sections we travelled on, are simple: if you want to go fast, stay in the left lane. If you want to go slow, stay out of the way and stick to the right hand lanes. It seems to work, and I was told German drivers are relatively disciplined. But I suspect that when crashes do occur, with cars hitting speeds in excess of 200 k/mh, nastiness must result. What does not kill us ...
And Germans clearly love cars as much as North Americans do. They're generally smaller: I saw very few SUVs and the police cars look like toys compared to the cruisers our cops drive. In Munich, headquarters to BMW, 18 per cent of all the cars on the road are made by that company. And traffic jams do happen. The first morning after we landed we hit backed up traffic from Munich airport on our way to Augsburg, which creates a bit of an irony: idling along at 5 k/mh on a highway of unlimited speed. Maybe there's a metaphor there for the apparently sluggish state of German politics compared to the potential the country possesses.
Bikes are common in the cities. You see people riding them all the time. In the countryside, bike routes physically separated from the highways and roads run throughout the country, making Germany a good cycling tour destination. In the cities, bikes often have their own lanes, either sharing roadspace or part of the wide sidewalks, and at intersections often have their own traffic lights. Cyclists get very annoyed at pedestrians who wander over the painted line into their space. And in contrast to Vancouver, where helmets must be worn by law and many cyclists wear dedicated bike clothing, the cyclists I saw looked like they'd just stepped out of the office or home. In Vancouver, preparing to ride your bike is like getting ready for battle. In Germany, it seems, it's just cycling.
Finally, there's the attention paid to pedestrians. They matter. Even in small towns like Landshut (pop. 60,000), whole blocks of the downtown core are closed off to all but pedestrians, buses and bikes. Munich was huge areas restricted to pedestrians, creating large areas where people walk, gather, meet in outdoor cafes, hold demonstrations and shop at the markets and stores that don't seem to suffer for the lack of car traffic. Walking around the downtown core is easy. You can do a circumference of the old city within an hour if you keep going. And if you're unable to walk far, tired or lazy, there is the underground U-bahn and the above ground trains. During public events, such as music festivals, the price of your ticket to the event often includes free use of the transit system. Let's see TransLink do that.
The photos:
Top: Looking out from a VW van to traffic controls on the autobahn. Heck if I know what those symbols mean.
Second from top: Pedestrian scene in the huge plaza in front of Munich city hall. Note the lack of vehicles.
Third from top: Vehicles of choice in Munich: a Smart car (although apparently the Smart car company is having financial trouble); another smaller car which may have been a Fiat; and a BMW, whose cars account for 18 per cent of the traffic in the city.
Fourth from top: Tourists on a cycle tour in a pedestrian area of Munich, not far from a tourist-oriented beer hall.
Bottom: an electric tram in Augsburg.
Today's bLINKit: Rocketboom, a hugely popular daily news site with a cheeky edge and a very cute anchor. It costs them a few bucks a day to do this short broadcast, and yet the people behind it rake in something like $80,000 a week.
Recent Comments