Macabre Christmas Greetings – Car Mania – Looking at: Munich …

The following “Christmas Greetings” were sent to me by a person I know quite well. He is a truly competent expert in the field of mobility. I would like to thank him very much, indeed!

Hello everybody,

here are a few current statistics about the number and system of drive for cars and trucks registered in Munich:

In particular, you can see that there are too many cars and they are equipped with the wrong drive – so are the trucks.
Basically, we are still (rather) far away from a change in mobility …
What a mess!

That made me thoughtful!

It is easy to calculate the sum of all cars by addition. You get a total of 717,940 – without trucks! And it seems that numbers are still rising.

Now let us assume that a car, if parked “bumper to bumper” needs a minimum of five metres parking space. If you multiply 717,940 (number of cars) with 5 metres (length of car with a little space in between), then you get 3,589,700 metres. In other words: if you park all cars of Munich in one long row (with little space in between), you need a street with the length of 3,590 kilometres!

According to Wikipedia Munich covers an area of

And this area will not increase. It is certainly not a solution to try and build basements underneath everything. Nor would it, in this case, make sense to “suburbanize” more areas.

Let me continue with my calculations. If Munich were a square, then the length of either side would be 17.6 km!!!

Now let me divide the length of the street we would need (3,590 km) by the 17.6 km side length. The result is: in our square Munich, we would need 204 parallel streets on 17.6 kilometres of length just to park our cars! In other words: there has to be a parking lane for cars every 86 metres. The number is a gross number, because each parking lane has to have a certain width.

Isn’t that a terrible concept? To be sure, Munich is not a square but a rather unorthodox shape. But that does not change anything about the principle. Consequently, I believe that this small computation should, indeed, worry us a little bit. What a stupid waste of valuable land and what a destruction of living space!
I find another concept no less worrying:

If you remember that there are hardly any cars left that weigh less than one ton and one can assume 1.25 tons as average car weight, then we have 897,425 tons of toxic waste in our beautiful Munich just sitting there. That is nine times the weight of the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as said toxic waste starts moving, it smells and generates dirt and makes many people sick. Moreover, it injures and kills people and, last not least, deprives them of exercise that would be so important for them – one of the consequences of which is poor health.

And I know from personal experience that, if you look closely and are even slightly willing, you only need cars on very rare occasions. There is hardly anything you cannot organize just as well without a car.

All you need is the willingness to forego a little bit of your comfort and to question what seems to go without saying. And you have to refuse to accept all the detrimental consequences, both for all of us and the users themselves (1.4 million traffic fatalities each year, destruction of our world, health damage by dirt and noise, destroying your own health by no longer exercising and becoming stress victims).

So it is all only about giving up a few sub-optimal and detrimental habits. Habits the positive effects of which are only allegedly positive effects, anyway. Those who are not prepared to do this are those for whom all help is in vain.
Consequently, the question is:

Are car drivers scum and riff-raff? Or are they just stupid? Or both?

Well, the aggressiveness of this statement is not something I like. In fact, I hate the sentence, because such generalization is not at all typical for me. But perhaps the gist is not all that wrong and perhaps, in the face of our car mania, there is no other way than to get the bat out of the sack like knave Ruprecht?

For me, this evil question is a good reason (because I want to be neither scum or riff-raff, nor stupid) to only get into a car if there are really very good and important reasons to do so. Basically, if I am actually almost forced to do it.

In my life, that happens maybe ten times a year – with a decreasing tendency. Mind you, at the same time I am more “mobile” than ever before, which I can prove by my Google-Tracking-Profile.

And my new active mobility feels absolutely great to me. I am also more efficient than I was before. I truly no longer have time to drive a car.

So, I, too, can only say:

🙂 What a mess!

RMD
(Translated by EG)

P.S.
I just received a supplementary email from the same source (i.e. the aforementioned expert). Here it is:

“looking at the low number of car-sharing vehicles (considerably less than 2,000, I am currently trying to find out the exact number) and at the fact that there will hardly be any additional railroad infrastructure for the Munich public transport although the number of inhabitants is expected to continue to grow in the next 5 to 10 years, it is quite easy to imagine how the public transport vehicles we now have and the cyclists’ paths will be even more crowded and narrow than they already are!
The negligibly small number of e-vehicles we expect in the next few years will not (be able to) contribute towards a reduction in air and noise pollution in the Munich city street network!

Consequently, the only things you can promote are active mobility (hiking and biking), public transport (short term: faster busses and special rights for busses) and the attempt at improving the vehicles’ drives (cars, trucks, busses, motorbikes, mopeds, construction machines, etc.)“.

All that remains to be done by me is thank the sender of the email and agree with everything he says. Except: when it comes to bikes, I have a slightly different opinion. We, the bikers, must fight the car drivers and thus gain the streets back from them! If there is no other way, then we must do it without legal support and by putting a little pressure on the powers that be.

Above all, we will continue with AktMobCmp. More motivated than ever!