South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Crumbling Autobahn prompts infrastructure spending spree
In Langsdorf, a tiny 200person village about 25 miles from Germany’s Baltic coast, the only thing separating residents from the local tavern is a narrow strip of pavement. The normally sleepy main street is now clogged with about
10,000 cars and trucks a day, making a quick visit for a mug of beer and a plate of smoked pork all but impossible.
“The noise and the stench of traffic are the biggest hardships for us,” Mayor Hartmut Kolschewski said standing alongside the cause of the problem: a stretch of the nearby A20 Autobahn that crumbled last year.
Germany’s once-envied network of roads, bridges and railways are decaying due to decades of underspending. The country has fallen to 15th in road quality behind Oman and Portugal, according to the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness rankings.
The A20 runs through Chancellor Angela Merkel’s election district. She opened the key artery for the former communist region in December 2005, less than a month after she was first sworn in as the country’s leader. But 12 years later, the four-lane highway caved in after the foundations gave way in the marshy landscape, marking the clearest sign of a growing infrastructure crisis.
In addition to the risk to human life, Germany’s economy is dependent on well-functioning transport networks to deliver goods. Traffic jams caused more than $68 billion in damage to the country’s economy last year from wasted working time and delivery delays, according to Michael Schreckenberg, a traffic researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen. A pile driver operates during ongoing repair work on the A20 Autobahn near Tribsees, Germany.
Catching up will be costly. The overall investment gap for German municipalities, which doesn’t include national and regional projects, amounted to about $184 billion in 2017, according to a study by state-owned investment bank KfW. Traffic infrastructure accounted for roughly a fourth of that amount.
Merkel’s government, which limited spending in the wake of Europe’s debt crisis, has woken up to the neglect. The coalition agreement earlier this year calls for record-level investment in infrastructure as well as about $2.8 billion for digital connectivity. Critics aren’t satisfied though.
“There’s still much too little happening when it comes to investments in Germany’s traffic facilities,” said Marcel Fratzscher, head of the Berlin-based DIW economic institute, pointing to Germany’s investment backlog of about $13 billion since 2013 as money spent by the government fails to keep pace with wear and tear.
While Germany’s oldschool infrastructure slowly decays, networks necessary for the evolving data economy are falling behind as well. In mobilephone penetration, the
country ranks 76th behind Algeria, Mali and Sri Lanka, according to the World Economic Forum.
Wireless dead zones are such a problem that transport minister Andreas Scheuer plans to roll out an app by the end of the year so people can report reception failures. At a summit this summer with network operators Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone Group and Telefonica, Scheuer also offered to reduce fees for new 5G licenses by about $1 billion in return for expanding coverage of current networks.
“Data are the most important resource nowadays,” said Bernhard Lorentz, a partner at consulting firm EY in Berlin. “If Germany wants to play a role here, it has to invest a lot more.”
Langsdorf is effectively at the epicenter of Germany’s infrastructure breakdown. Mayor Kolschewski often has to wander into his garden to pick up a mobilephone signal. Meanwhile, traffic rumbles through town amid work on the damaged half-mile stretch.
“The repairs are fairly loud, but this is like music to us villagers,” said the retired teacher, pointing to a bridge head where Merkel opened the highway. The reopening isn’t scheduled before 2021. Harry Overly moved from Chicago to become the new CEO and president of Sun-Maid.