Germans’ aversion to autobahn limit strong
It seemed like a BERLIN — no-brainer: Lower Germany’s embarrassingly high carbon emissions at no cost, and save some lives in the process.
But when a government-appointed commission in January dared to float the idea of a speed limit on the autobahn, the country’s storied highway network, it almost caused rioting.
Irate drivers took to the airwaves. Union leaders menacingly put on their yellow vests, hinting at street protests. And the far-right opposition used the opportunity to rage against the “stranglehold” of the state.
A highway speed limit was “contrary to every common sense,” the transport minister, Andreas Scheuer, swiftly declared, contradicting his own experts. And that was that.
As far as quasi-religious national obsessions go for large portions of a country’s population, the German aversion to speed limits on the autobahn is up there with gun control in America, whaling in Japan and sovereignty in Britain.
With few exceptions, like Afghanistan and the Isle of Man, there are highway speed limits essentially everywhere else in the world.
But this is Germany, the self-declared “auto nation,” where Carl Benz built the first automobile and where cars are not only the proudest export item but also a symbol of national identity.
It’s also the country where, in darker times, Hitler laid the groundwork for a network of multilane highways that in the postwar years came to epitomize economic success — and freedom.
Call it Germany’s Wild West: The autobahn is the one place in a highly regulated society where no rule is the rule — and that place is sacred.
“It’s a very emotional topic,” confided Stefan Gerwens, head of transport and mobility at ADAC, an automobile club with 20 million members, which is opposed to any speed limit.
So emotional, apparently, that facts and figures count for little.
Germany is woefully behind on meeting its 2020 climate goals, so the government appointed a group of experts to find ways to lower emissions in the transport sector. Cars account for 11 percent of total emissions, and their share is rising.
A highway speed limit of 120 kph, or 75 mph, could cover a fifth of the gap to reach the 2020 goals for the transport sector, environmental experts say.
“Of all the individual measures, it is the one that would be the most impactful — and it costs nothing,” said Dorothee Saar, of Deutsche Umwelthilfe, a nonprofit environmental organization that has lobbied for a speed limit.
“But when it comes to cars,” Saar sighed, “the debate tends to become irrational.”
There are already speed limits on almost 30 percent of roughly 8,000 miles of autobahn, imposed to regulate noise near urban centers and reduce safety risks on roads deemed unfit for unlimited speeding. The number of deadly accidents on stretches of autobahn that have a speed limit are 26 percent lower than on those without.
In 2017, 409 people died on the autobahn and in almost half the cases, the reason was inappropriate speeding, according to the German statistics office.
But that hasn’t swayed public opinion.
About half of Germans remain opposed to autobahn speed limits, a proportion that has not budged in the last decade, according to Michael Kunert, director of the polling company Infratest Dimap.
An autobahn speed limit would make a significant minority of “people take to the barricades,” Kunert said. Or at the very least, he added, “it would stop them from voting for a party that passed one.”
Once, during the oil crisis in 1973, a German transport minister took his chances and imposed a speed limit. Road deaths stood at over 20,000 a year at the time (six times today’s level), and with oil prices skyrocketing, Lauritz Lauritzen thought Germans might reasonably see the benefits of saving some lives and some money on gas, too.
The speed limit lasted four months, and Lauritzen not much longer.
The experiment gave birth to the “Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger!” campaign — or “Freedom to drive for free citizens!” — the car lobby’s most powerful slogan to this day, and one used by political parties and car companies alike, a sort of unwritten second amendment.
“It’s all about freedom,” said John C. Kornblum, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, who first arrived here in the 1960s, and has been living (and driving) here on and off ever since.
“In that sense it really is like gun control,” Kornblum added, albeit with far fewer deaths. “All the rational arguments are there, but there is barely any point in having a rational debate.”