Heat and traffic turnaround: That’s why there is now a real Zoff in the traffic lights

At a coalition summit on Sunday, the traffic light parties want to clear up several points of contention. But the positions are hardened.

He hopes “that we can untie many knots and overcome many blockages this week”. What he is alluding to: The traffic light has scheduled a coalition committee for Sunday, in which the parties want to find compromises. There are likely to be two major issues:

With regard to the transport strategy, opinions differ, especially among the FDP and the Greens. In general, the Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan 2030 provides for the so-called overall network to be strengthened with 270 billion euros. In concrete terms, this means that the government wants to use the money to ensure that there are fewer traffic jams on the federal trunk roads, more capacity for passenger and freight traffic on the rails and more economical transport options on the federal waterways.

The problem: “With accelerated expansion, rail and road are competing for one and the same skilled workers,” says Dirk Flege, head of the Pro-Rail Alliance. Discussions are sparked where the need is greatest.

FDP Transport Minister Volker Wissing wants motorways to be built more quickly in addition to new railway lines and bridges. The Greens reject it. Her focus is on rails and power grids. The argument: The coalition agreement regulates where planning should be accelerated, said Green Party leader Katharina Dröge. “And those are rails, those are bridges, and that’s network expansion.”

Dröge argued that if you really want to speed up projects in Germany, you have to set priorities. “That means you have to pool money and resources, i.e. personnel, where it is needed.” The renovation of highways would bind important staff, said Dröge. “And in the end that leads to a planning backlog in Germany. And we as Greens don’t want to be responsible for this planning backlog.”

The SPD insists on a compromise: parliamentary group leader Detlef Müller told the German Press Agency that there is a consensus on planning acceleration for important rail transport projects. “The areas of road and shipping have not been clarified. For the SPD parliamentary group there are also projects in these areas that are of paramount importance because they ensure decisive improvements at critical points of the respective transport routes.”

For this, the SPD proposed criteria that could be used to reduce the “bottleneck list” of motorway projects, according to Müller. “We should reserve the additional effect of accelerating planning for projects in the outstanding public interest for those road construction projects that actually have a very great benefit. If we concentrate on this, we will come to a common position in the coalition committee.”

The FDP leadership said that Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing had presented a list of 144 projects weeks ago that corresponded exactly to the definition of the SPD. Müller’s statement was seen there as support for Wissing, which was therefore a signal to the Greens to give in and clear the way for an overall understanding. “Only the complete refusal of the Greens on the streets has so far prevented a solution to the decision-making backlog,” the dpa news agency quoted the party leadership as saying.

A study published by Greenpeace on Thursday does not exactly play into the cards of the FDP in the debate: According to this, the construction and expansion of motorways and federal roads threatens to become three times as expensive as originally calculated by Wissing’s ministry. Instead of the originally calculated 50.9 billion, the construction of the originally 800 top-priority road projects will cost a total of 153 billion euros by 2035, according to the analysis.