Why Berlin?
A quick search for “Paris” in the Streetsblog archives leads to an impressive 323 hits. London is not far behind, with 300 even. Amsterdam (111), Copenhagen (61), and Barcelona (27) trail with some distance. And Berlin? While officially there are 30 hits, none of those is about initiatives in the city itself.
As a frequent visitor to the city, where my parents live, I have always wondered why this is the case. Berlin seems quite livable to me: quiet, traffic-calmed neighborhoods abound, many streets are outfitted with separated, sidewalk-level bike lanes, and the transit system runs frequently and late into the night. Berlin’s bike mode share (18%) is greater than the other major European capitals (London, Paris, Madrid, and Rome) combined! And despite having a population four times the size of San Francisco, it’s traffic fatality rate is only two-thirds higher.
Yet therein lies the problem. Berlin is not at the beginning of its transformation, nor at the end. There are still plenty of cars on the road, the bike network is far from complete, and street space has not been clawed back from vehicles on any significant scale. So it serves neither as an example of how an American city can begin the shift away from an autocentric paradigm, nor as an example of the result of such a transformation.
Perhaps because of its status as a pretty livable city, there has been little pressure for Berlin to launch an ambitious urban revitalization initiative similar to those in Barcelona, Paris, or London. In addition, the two moderate parties that have ruled Germany and many of its cities and states over the past fifteen years are hesitant to change the status quo for fear of angering car-owning constituents. They also have close ties to the German auto industry.
But two dry summers, major floods, and Greta Thunberg have completely changed the political landscape. Of the 4 million protestors that took part in the September 20th, 2019 climate strike, fully 1.4 million were from Germany. That year, the Greens achieved their best results ever during the European elections, coming in second behind Angela Merkel’s Christian democrats (CDU, or Union). Since then, the Greens have won mayor offices in several German cities and formed coalitions with other parties in eleven of Germany’s sixteen states. And polls even briefly showed them ahead of CDU in the late spring of 2021.
In Berlin, the Greens entered government in 2016 as the junior party in a coalition with the social democrats (SPD). During the campaign, they promised to implement policies demanded by supporters of a bike referendum the year prior. Under the (international) radar, they have since launched a number of ambitious projects, including a network of bicycle superhighways, a mobility law to increase walking, biking, and public transit ridership, and the development of the city’s first car-lite neighborhood.
Activists are not satisfied with the pace of change, however, and a new Referendum to rid the entire inner city of cars has been submitted to the government. If the Greens win the election in September, Berlin (like Germany) could experience a renaissance of environmental action and progressive urban planning.