In Berlin, bicycles and e-scooters are to be parked in car parking lots so that sidewalks are no longer obstacle courses for pedestrians. A completely wrong way, finds Munich Mayor Reiter. He wants something completely different.
Munich (dpa/lby) – Munich’s Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD) vehemently rejects the Berlin decision to release paid parking spaces for two-wheelers free of charge. “I really think that’s the wrong approach,” said Reiter of the German Press Agency in Munich. More parking spaces for bicycles are also urgently needed in Munich. “More needs to happen. But please don’t use these confrontational approaches just to demonstrate: Yes, we are now taking this space away from you drivers and occupying it for cyclists. And to be honest, we are already very strong in the ideological area, and that I do not like it.”
This path certainly does not help to promote the merging of types of mobility. Rather, he would like the types of traffic to be “reconciled,” said Reiter. After all, with good will, it could become easier for everyone. “But we’re just very German there.”
As an example, Reiter painted a situation in which a pedestrian walks along one edge of a five-meter-wide sidewalk and a cyclist drives past on the other edge. “I’ll bet with you: Every second Munich resident then complains and says, ‘You can’t drive up there’, although the cyclist doesn’t bother them at all. We just have to be a little more Mediterranean,” demanded the mayor. There, not everyone insists on their (supposed) rights in traffic.
The Berlin mobility senator Bettina Jarasch (Greens) announced this week that bicycles, but also electric and other small vehicles may and should be parked in car parking lots in the future in order to make the sidewalks, which are very crowded in many places, passable for pedestrians again. Munich, on the other hand, is taking the approach of dismantling parking spaces at road junctions and mounting brackets there to lock bicycles, explained Reiter. This also serves to improve road safety when blocked lines of sight become free again.
