Darmstadt (dpa/lhe) – The Hessian City Council has requested significantly more funding from the state to expand local public transport. “You can’t announce a traffic turnaround in a country without having made the necessary financial resources available in the long term,” said the President of the City Council, the Mayor of Fulda, Heiko Wingenfeld (CDU), on Wednesday in Darmstadt. According to the needs calculations of the three transport associations, there would be a deficit of at least 2.3 billion euros over the next five years. The effects of the war in Ukraine and the development of energy prices are not included here.
“We have to expand whatever is possible,” said Darmstadt’s Mayor Jochen Partsch. It is incomprehensible that the state sees potential savings of 800 million euros here. The question now is who will finance the expansion and how much will the state contribute to offsetting the deficit. Funds would have to be made available for this in the coming double budget. In Darmstadt alone, the costs for maintaining local transport increased from 21.4 million to 37 million euros from 2019 to 2022, not least due to new connections. “Many tasks are assigned to us by the federal or state governments but are not sufficiently funded.”
