Focus on climate crisis
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Reporting on climate change is one of the major journalistic challenges of our time. The climate crisis is also one of the most important issues of humanity for SPIEGEL. For this reason, we support an international initiative that seeks to take a look this week: "Covering Climate Now" has been initiated by the Columbia Journalism Review and the Canadian newspaper "The Nation", with more than 200 media companies worldwide including the Guardian, El País, La Repubblica, The Times of India, Bloomberg or Vanity Fair. SPIEGEL is dedicating the cover story of the current issue to the climate crisis this week and every day pays special attention to mirror.de
At the International Motor Show (IAA) in Frankfurt these days, it seems as though the glory of the car is coming to an end. Environmentalists brand industry and vehicles as climate killers, politicians demand the departure of fuel-guzzling SUV. The industry itself is thinking behind closed doors of an end to the fair as a vehicle show. She wants to present "more mobility concepts in the future", rumored the "Handelsblatt".
Sounds plausible and somehow for the future - but in the present time, the Germans rely so much on their own car as never before. At the beginning of 2019, there were 567 cars in the Federal Republic of Germany for 1,000 inhabitants - a historic high. This has resulted in an evaluation of SPIEGEL on the basis of data from the Federal Motor Vehicle Authority and the Federal Statistical Office. The year before, the value had been 561 cars, in 2008 it was only 501.
There are so many cars in your region
Number of cars per 1000 inhabitants 2019 and the change since 2008 Click on the map for details.
* Landkreis Mecklenburgische Seenplatte and Vorpommern-Greifswald: Due to a territorial reform of 2011, a municipality changed between the newly established districts. Therefore, the two districts were summarized for the analysis of the change between 2008 and 2019.
On the one hand, the numbers attest to growing prosperity in the population. But they are also a warning signal. More cars need more space, a total of 47.1 million units were approved at the turn of the year. And it is even more difficult to reduce emissions of climate-damaging greenhouse gases such as CO2 - especially as most vehicles are still powered by internal combustion engines.
In any case, Germany is not doing so hard in any area as it is in the transport sector to meet its climate goals. According to the Federal Environmental Agency, emissions from passenger car traffic rose by 0.5 percent between 1995 and 2017 - a key reason why it is unlikely that it will be possible to reduce total CO2 emissions by 2020 by the planned 40 percent compared to 1990 levels.
Especially in rural areas, car density has increased in recent years - at an already high level. In many parts of Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate come to 1000 inhabitants now almost 700 cars and some more. In the Main-Taunus-Kreis between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden (Hesse) there are 794 cars.
Leader is Wolfsburg with 1110 cars. However, Volkswagen distorts the statistics in the city of Lower Saxony, because the Group there allows almost all German company vehicles, as a company spokesman confirmed - each year about 100,000 pieces.
The steadily growing number of vehicles alerts experts. "That's not good news, it's going in the wrong direction," says traffic expert Wiebke Zimmer from the Öko-Institut in Berlin. "At least in the cities, the goal should be to lower the rate thanks to other mobility concepts."
But there are strong forces that move in the other direction - also social. Today more women drive their own car than before. They are more often in gainful employment, and often the family's everyday life takes place within a larger radius. Old people are also more likely to be motorized because they have got used to the car all their lives - unlike the prewar generation. "Someone who grew up driving a car is less likely to move," says Zimmer.
In addition, having your own car is more essential than ever in many rural areas. "Never before has the public transport service in rural areas been as bad as it is today," says traffic researcher Andreas Knie from the Social Science Research Center Berlin. In many places, 80 to 85 percent of local public transport is school bus travel. At the same time, politics is constantly promoting the automobile and approving new roads and shopping malls with large parking lots outside the cities, says Knie. The policy had "simply turn this spiral in favor of the car".
Unsurprisingly, fewer cars are allowed in cities and densely populated areas than in rural areas. So Berlin comes to 332 cars per 1000 inhabitants, making it the area with the lowest motorization in Germany. And in other conurbations such as the Ruhr area or Munich, the number of registered cars is below the federal average.
"In metropolitan areas, people have new options - thanks to digitization, thanks to new transport services, and because owning a car is often a burden," says Knie. As a merit of the policy, he does not see that the motorization partially sinks.
This also seems to apply to Bonn, one of the few cities in which the number of cars per 1,000 inhabitants has been steadily declining for several years. The latest figure was 535, which was 3.3 percent less than in 2014.
When asked how it happened, there is no clear answer in the federal city, the phenomenon is there also rather unknown. An amended company car policy of large companies such as the German Post should rather not be, said a company spokeswoman. The local traffic club refers to the many young people in the city, who increasingly renounced their own car.
If politics were to intervene more strongly, it would be possible to significantly reduce the number of vehicles both in the cities and in the countryside - without sacrificing comfort for residents, transport expert Knie is convinced. "In the city, the number of cars per 1000 inhabitants in the next 25 years should fall to one-tenth, in the country by half."
Could be made possible by the restrictions on cars in the cities as well as new transport options in urban areas and in the countryside, where people share private cars via digital platforms. Also helpful are more bike paths. Commercial car sharing, on the other hand, is too insignificant, and traditional local traffic in rural areas too inflexible.
Until something changes, however, it still seems to be a long way off, as a representative survey by SPIEGEL shows. Three quarters of all respondents (75.1 percent) consider a car to be "definitely" or "more" necessary. For very young people, the value is not fundamentally lower (62.6 percent). Even in areas with a very high population density, more than every second thinks so. At least.
