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Climate crisis: Austria cancels motorway construction

2021-12-01T15:06:21.059Z


The government in Vienna is canceling the construction of a two billion euro motorway. The future should not be concreted over, they say.


Enlarge image

Federal road in Austria

Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / picture alliance / dpa

While the global climate is heating up, highways will continue to be built in Germany and elsewhere.

Austria is now taking a different path and is canceling large-scale projects that have been planned for a long time to protect the environment.

A two billion euro motorway near Vienna is not being built, nor are several expressways in Lower Austria.

Austria's climate protection minister Leonore Gewessler from the Greens justified the decision: "I don't want us to say in 20 years' time: We have buried billions in tax money and concreted our future." Last year the minister ordered a kind of climate check for state road construction projects, to weigh the benefits and harms of such projects.

Almost half of the planned 19 kilometers of motorway north of Vienna would have crossed under a nature reserve as a tunnel.

Experience shows that new roads lead to more traffic, said Gewessler, who is also responsible for mobility.

Climate-damaging CO₂ gets into the atmosphere not only through vehicles, but also through construction.

Vienna's mayor Michael Ludwig sharply criticized the move: "This is a blow to people's quality of life." More traffic jams and exhaust fumes can now be expected.

The influential social democratic politician threatened that the last word had not yet been spoken.

Traffic light: No new building stops in Germany

In Germany, too, the future traffic light coalition wants to put planned megaprojects to the test.

In the case of motorways, more emphasis is to be placed on maintenance and renovation and the federal traffic route plan is to be modernized with a view to environmental protection.

However, it is still open whether and how this will work out.

In any case, there should not be a general new construction stop.

Expensive motorway extensions such as those in Hesse (A49) or Berlin (A100) are not only criticized by climate protectors, but also by transport planners.

The three-kilometer extension of the A100 alone will cost taxpayers 700 million euros.

Two other city highways in Berlin, on the other hand, are to be dismantled as "oversized relics of the car-centered city", as stated in the contradicting coalition agreement of the red-green-red city government.

The Federal Ministry of Transport has the largest investment budget of all departments because of the high costs of road construction.

After a CSU politician had always been at the top since 2009, with Volker Wissing the FDP is now taking over the management of the ministry for the first time.

In the coalition negotiations on transport, the liberals had prevailed over some points against the Greens and the SPD in terms of content.

The speed limit on motorways required by the Federal Environment Agency is not to be introduced.

fww / dpa

Source: spiegel

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