Buxtehude is avant-garde. The small town west of Hamburg, known as the setting of Grimm's fairy tale of the hare and the hedgehog, was the place where Germany's first 1983 km/h zone was established in November 30 – against massive resistance. But the protests quickly faded, and the attempt became a great success story. Today there are 30 km/h zones in all cities of the country.
Andreas Frey
Freelance author in science for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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Now the speed has been further throttled in parts of the old town of Buxtehude. Since the summer, there have been 20 km/h signs at the western end of the pedestrian zone, but this is still too fast for Johannes Kleber, the urban traffic planner. He would have liked to have ordered a speed limit of 10 km/h in order to slow down life in the old town. It is very cramped and bustling there, he says, but comfortable. Buxtehude wants to be even more like the clever hedgehog. Who slows down, wins.
Word of this motto has not yet spread to Berlin. For decades, the Ministry of Transport has been opposing to give municipalities a free hand in terms of speed. Any push to slow down the pace in cities and towns triggers an emotional debate in the country. Motorists feel harassed and their personal freedom violated, while residents and parents finally demand more peace and security.
This was already the case in 1957, when Germany argued about the reintroduction of speed limits within built-up areas. Mothers complained of children who had been killed while playing cars, opponents of the speed limit did not blame the high speed, but the lack of driving skills of motorists. In the end, the first speed limit was decided. Since then, 50 km/h has been in force in Germany – good reasons are needed for 30 km/h. And usually there must be a serious accident before the speed limit is lowered.
The municipalities are slowly getting tired of
To this day, little has changed. The federal government sets the pace, although applications to change the legal framework were already made in the Bundestag at the end of the eighties. Even then, the applicants pursued three goals: more road safety, more environmental protection, more quality of life. But the attempts failed in the committee committees. Motorists would simply not accept and comply with such speed limits, was the justification in the nineties. This attitude remained, the car was given priority and right of way at all times, even in 2010, when the Scientific Advisory Board at the Ministry of Transport recommended the introduction of 30 km/h as the new standard speed.
And today? Today, it is enough for the municipalities. They no longer want to be told where they can introduce a speed limit. Almost 500 cities, municipalities and districts are therefore involved in the cross-party initiative "Liveable City", which major cities such as Freiburg, Cologne, Leipzig and Bremen founded in the summer of 2021. It thus covers around 28 million inhabitants, one third of the country.