On August, 18th, 2015, there was an article by Christian Sebald on street construction in the County Munich Section of the SZ:
B 15 maintenance will cost more than twice as much
It said:
“that continuing with the work on the controversial new B 15 will cost more than twice as much as had been anticipated. This can be concluded from a reply by the Federal Traffic Secretary Dorothee Bär (CSU) following a question from the Representative from Landshut Thomas Gambke (Grüne). According to this reply, the nine kilometres between Ergoldsbach in Lower Bavaria and the motorway A 92, will cost around 182 million Euros. Before now, they had estimated 88 million Euros.“
Well, this is more than a hundred per cent increase.
According to the SZ,
“the new B 15 between Regensburg and Rosenheim is one of the most controversial street construction projects in Bavaria. First plans were made in the 1960ies. In those days, it was planned to have 130 kilometres of motorway connecting Regensburg, Landshut and Rosenheim. Later, they modified the project to make it just a Federal Highway.
But with its four lines and two hard shoulders, it is a Federal Highway that looks a lot like a motorway running through the scenery over the 30 kilometres north of Landshut.”
I do not understand why these kinds of projects are still executed. If we invest into streets at all, one would expect the focus to be on the infra-structure we already have.
Our future will not improve by building more streets. The car as a basic means of transportation is becoming obsolete. The structures of our co-existence change. And nor do we, due to the challenges we face in educational and social politics, have the money to build new racing tracks for the die-hard reactionaries. Another reason is the demographic situation – even if today it is mostly the elderly persons you find on the streets with their status symbols. Because this generation will die – and many things will be done in a totally different way by the new generation (at least that is what I hope). I am not even mentioning the climate catastrophe that will also bring quite a bit of change for us.
Neither is the fact that those living close by the streets suffer from the traffic an argument in favour of building new streets. It is easy to come up with plenty of reasons for building streets around something or other! The first thing the communities should do is reduce the “home-made traffic” – which is always a considerable part of the problem, before laying the groundwork for a reduction of the through-traffic.
But let us continue with what it says in the SZ article.
There are several reasons for the cost explosion. First and foremost, the former
estimation is almost ten years old and therefore obsolete. “You have to calculate two to three per cent increase each year”, a speaker of the Autobahndirection Süd, which is responsible for the planning process, says. “This is due to the general inflation”.
This is also something that constantly annoys me. Allegedly, we have no inflation, but for all cost explosions, you give it as a reason.
On the whole, the article is truly worth reading. Just like I am a true fan of the online Süddeutsche Zeitung. As soon as you have access, your login can happen from all places (Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows 8). You no longer have old paper to dispose of and neither do you have to get rid of all the many advertisement before starting to read the SZ.
Consequently, I have no problem doing a bit of advertising for the SZ:
So – if you feel like it, just try it:
Now 14 days free testing under
www.sz.de/apptesten
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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