Despite the climate debate, commuting government officials released 109,422 tickets for flights between Cologne / Bonn and Berlin last year for more than 200,000 round-trip flights. During the same period they only traveled 26,661 times by train. This emerges from a response from the government to an FDP request that was reported by the "Bild" newspaper first.
In the first half of the year 2019 employees of the federal ministries flew the route already 61,839 times, whereas 13,991 train tickets were solved. Excluded are journeys with the BahnCard 100, whose owners can travel without a ticket. How often government officials used the car for business travel is not clear from the paper.
"In the last year alone, the employees of the federal ministries took the plane more than ten times more often than the train to travel back and forth between the government seats in Bonn and Berlin," criticized FDP member Katharina Willkomm. "This is neither exemplary nor comprehensible."
Video conferencing as an alternative
The Federal Environment Ministry said: With similar travel times and prices government officials should prefer the railway air traffic. The route Berlin - Cologne / Bonn takes about one hour and 15 minutes by plane. Travelers need about four times as long by train.
In addition, travel would only be carried out if there were no cost-effective alternatives such as videoconferencing, a ministry spokesman said. Compared to 2012, significantly more civil servants would now attend meetings and committees using such technology. They want to expand the offer.
"Nevertheless, there will continue to be unavoidable business trips," the spokesman said. The Ministry of the Environment wants to further tighten the already existing rules by amending the Federal Travel Expenses Act.
"Our suggestion is that the environmental compatibility in the travel expense law is just as important as economic efficiency," said the spokesman. "Then, on many routes, rail travel could become the rule and fly to the exception."
