The federal government has agreed to extend planning acceleration for selected motorway projects in Germany. The SPD, Greens, and FDP were able to agree on 144 total projects, however, only seven out of 16 federal states will benefit from this. Volker Wissing, the Federal Transport Minister, believes that the increased traffic volume requires fast renovation and construction of motorways to be tackled more quickly than before, claiming that renovation needs to be accelerated to remove bottlenecks in the motorway network.
The Greens initially declined to extend the planning accelerations agreed for the expansion of infrastructure of renewable energy suppliers to motorways, but a compromise was reached. This includes a shortened plan for a few transport projects, with more money than originally planned going into the renovation of the railway. Additionally, photovoltaic systems will be installed on soundproof walls.
The seven federal states that will benefit from the shortened planning are North Rhine-Westphalia, Hesse, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland Palatinate, Lower Saxony, and Bremen. The densely populated North Rhine-Westphalia will develop into a denser motorway network much quicker than previously planned. The projects that have been brought forward in the other federal states can primarily be found where traffic has been backed up for decades.
However, the planning acceleration alone will not build a single additional meter of road; it only reduces one obstacle. With faster implementation, budgets will need to be rearranged, and construction costs may arise years earlier than originally planned. The debate on how to do this is likely to entail a certain need for discussion in the current governing coalition.
