Is Stuttgart finally giving in?
As has been reported frequently in recent weeks, many metropolitan areas are currently deciding to take special measures in the transport sector.
Where otherwise trucks and cars would crowd together and make their way through the road networks of international cities in the deepest exhaust fog, there is sometimes a yawning emptiness. This brings the bicycle back onto the scene, which has recently become more popular than usual. Cleared vehicle lanes for bikes are currently the order of the day in major cities. New York, Vienna, Bogota, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Paris are only a few cities that have already decided or are currently thinking intensively about implementing corresponding projects.
While some cities are already pulling out all the stops quickly and intelligently to implement the measures mentioned above, the metropolis with the most famous environmental zone in Germany, Stuttgart, is reluctant to loosely or temporarily suspend the statutes.
But now it seems that the Neckar has gone completely mad. Baden-Württemberg's Environment Minister Franz Untersteller (Greens) expects that the driving bans in the Motor City will soon become superfluous. "I assume that in Stuttgart, driving bans due to exceeding the nitrogen oxide limits are now a thing of the past. I hope that we can now get around this problem as a whole," the Green politician told the Stuttgarter Nachrichten.
With all the chaos that has so far been experienced around the subject of the Stuttgart environmental zone, this is news that remains to be awaited with caution and due scepticism.