Construction costs are currently skyrocketing

Public transport in Berlin used to work well, around 1910-1940,
there were hardly any private cars on the road.
If today all drivers had to switch, public transport would collapse.
You can see this with 10cm of snow or black ice.
Travel times from now up to 1 hour increase massively, many destinations are not reachable. A route and a station are being built for Tesla, guess who is protesting.
The public transport from the 1920 standard can't do it any better.

Public transport in Berlin used to work well, around 1910-1940, back then there were hardly any private cars on the roads. Today, if all drivers had to switch, public transport would collapse. You can see that when there is 10cm of snow or black ice. Travel times extend massively from now up to 1 hour, many destinations become unreachable. A route and a station are being built for Tesla, guess who protests there. The public transport from around 1920 doesn’t handle that any better.

Car traffic in Berlin also constantly collapses. It’s not like that is an alternative. At my previous employer in Berlin, the free employee parking spaces were abolished after the parking area we had used until then was built over. The office was right in the city center. We had paid a relatively low rent for the area, which is why the costs were not passed on. We also had visitor and customer parking spaces. In total, there were about 30 parking spaces now missing. My department had to look for an alternative because my bosses also thought employees urgently needed parking options. We were able to make a contract with a neighboring company for joint use of a parking garage. The colleagues would have had to pay 20 euros per month per parking space. There was an uprising. More than two-thirds rejected the new parking spaces and either came to the office by public transport or bike, or parked in the surrounding area. Only some colleagues who commuted from the villages to the city and the company management used the parking spaces. We then paid rent for parking spaces for a year that were hardly used. The administrative effort was absurd. Requests as to whether something like a job ticket could be offered were rejected. It was too expensive for the company. The fact that there were no bike stands for the cyclists showed even more where the priorities lay. But every email signature included the note that this was a green office and that therefore documents would only be printed. :rolleyes:

About cars and giving them up. Yes, theoretically possible in big cities. Why don’t people do it? Just out of convenience? I know three rather large cities somewhat better, Hamburg, B and Vienna. In Vienna, I would definitely always use trains and buses. The service is clean, very safe, very polite in dealings with each other. They offer elderly people a seat, nothing is vandalized, nobody drinks on the train, no rowdy gangs. In B and Hamburg the frequency is great too, but the rest is not….dirty, unsafe. I myself would not always want to use trains and buses in those two cities. In smaller cities like Kiel, the level of development is no longer such that there is always an alternative to a car.

Electricity on the spot market today over 500€ / MWh peakload. epexspot com/en I’m dying laughing! We are usually at the spot market at maybe 40-55€. That’s a tenfold increase. (50C/kwh) Good that we will shut down more nuclear power plants at the end of 2021. It hasn’t been a long time since so much electricity was generated so dirty with coal as currently.

Among some other factors, the currently failed French nuclear power plants are mainly to blame for the misery. Hopefully ours will be shut down soon!

In smaller cities like Kiel, the expansion standard is no longer such that there is always an alternative to the car.

I wouldn't literally say "always." In many cases, the bike is still a good alternative and thus contradicts your statement. I regularly receive admiring looks because I ride my bike 20 km one way to work. The world of people has really become small; everything that goes beyond a stone's throw apparently becomes a problem. And those who overcome the stone's throw are admired. Also nonsense. A person can exert quite a bit of muscle power to get around. It just isn't always comfortable and easy. But certainly healthy and possible. And thus a very usable alternative to the car in many cases.