Zahlen, bitte! 13,210 kilometers of freeway
Whether on the way home from vacation – or transporting the long-awaited online order. They both share the highway.
(Image: heise medien)
Many people will start their vacation on the freeway again this year: with lots of traffic, roadworks and long journeys, you need to be calm and patient until you reach your desired destination. Without the highway network, however, the trip would take much longer. Our article on this was once much discussed in the heise forum. We have therefore taken the liberty of updating it and republishing it as Numbers, please! Classic.
"Autobahn" is one of the few German words that is known worldwide: In America in particular, it is associated with the freedom to drive as fast as your gas pedal and gas tank will take you on a well-built, intersection-free road.
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In reality, the actual volume of traffic and the growing number of speed-limited sections on the 13,210-kilometer German freeway network speak against this. Thanks to the lack of a general speed limit, the autobahn is a global myth.
AVUS as the first automobile road
A forerunner of the German autobahns was first built in Berlin. The Automobil-Verkehrs-und-Ăśbungs-StraĂźe (AVUS), the first road created exclusively for automobiles, was planned as early as 1909, but not realized until 1921 due to the war. Leading from the Berlin Radio Tower through the Grunewald forest, it served primarily as a test and race track before being incorporated into the Berlin Ring Road in 1940 and thus transformed from a private to a public road.
The idea was given a further boost by the opening of the Autostrada dei Laghi, the first purely motorway in Italy, which ran from Milan to Varese and was opened in 1924. It was built privately and was to be paid for by tolls.
(Image:Â Markus Will)
Pent-up demand in the vehicle fleet
At the same time, contemporary statistics indicated that the former cradle of the automobile was falling behind in terms of individual mobility: on average, one in every 321 inhabitants owned a car in Germany. In France, the figure was one in 90, while in the UK it was one in 71.
And in the USA, thanks to Ford, one in seven people even owned a car. However, the number of vehicles doubled rapidly during the Weimar Republic: from 100,340 cars in 1923, the number rose to 206,456 just three years later. By 1933, there were already almost 800,000 motor vehicles.
Planned highway from north to south
In this climate of enormous growth in automobility, the Hamburg - Frankfurt - Basel Association (HAFRABA), founded on November 6, 1926, in the Geschlechterstube in Frankfurt City Hall, wanted to build an intersection-free highway connecting the cities that gave the road its name. As with the Italian model, financing was to be secured through tolls, which were to be staggered as follows:
- Car with driver: 3 pfennigs per kilometer
- Each additional passenger: 1 pfennig per kilometer
- Lorry: 2 pfennigs per kilometer
- Freight: ½ pfennig per ton and kilometer
The head and first chairman of the association was Geheime Regierungsrat Professor Robert Otzen from the Technical University of Hanover. He was very impressed by the Italian model and was keen to implement this motorway concept in Germany.
(Image:Â Gemeinfrei)
The plan was to build a highway route from Hamburg via Hanover, Kassel, Frankfurt am Main to Basel and on to Italy. The route planned at the time roughly corresponds to the route of today's A7/A5 from Hamburg to Frankfurt.
Freeway as a Nazi propaganda tool
Robert Otzen also coined the term "autobahn" around 1930 to distinguish it from the railroad. Ironically, it was the Nazis who put up the greatest resistance to these plans: They saw them as escalating costs and ideal guidance systems for enemy bombers. This attitude was to change fundamentally when Hitler came to power in 1933.
Now the autobahn was no longer a superfluous cost factor, but a first-class propaganda project and a major job creation measure. The Nazis not only adopted the detailed plans drawn up by HaFraBa, but also renamed the organization Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung der Reichsautobahn (GEZUVOR). They also claimed authorship of the idea for the highway. According to propaganda legend, Adolf Hitler had the idea for the autobahn as early as 1923, although there is no evidence of this.
Cologne - Bonn connected by highway
But somehow the delay had to be explained, because the dictator even missed the opening of the first autobahn: on August 6, 1932, the then mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, opened the Cologne-Bonn route, which already had most of the characteristics of an autobahn.
Thereafter, things went from strength to strength: by the end of the war in 1945, 3746 kilometers of freeway had been built under sometimes murderous conditions. Deaths were not uncommon on the highway construction sites. However, freeways played a subordinate role in the Second World War: on the one hand, the first freeways were not yet suitable for heavy loads, and on the other, most troops and weapons of war were transported by rail.
(Image:Â CC BY-SA 4.0, Partynia)
After the war, with the economic miracle, the flagging car industry began to pick up speed again. With small cars such as the VW Beetle, Lloyd Alexander, BMW Isetta or Opel Kadett, German citizens traveled across the Brenner Pass to Italy. Incidentally, the original HAFRABA route was completed in 1962.
Numbers, please!
By 1970, the West German freeway network had slowly grown to 4110 kilometers. By 1990, it had already reached 8822 kilometers. With reunification and new freeway projects, the freeways grew to the aforementioned 12,996 kilometers in 2017. Only Spain has a larger network across the EU with over 15,000 kilometers. In total, the EU's freeways have a total length of around 80,000 kilometers.
Germany has a total of 137 freeway junctions, 106 freeway interchanges, 2,260 junctions, and around 1,895 bridges. The maintenance and cleaning of the roads is carried out by the employees of around 190 highway and road maintenance depots (who in Braunschweig sometimes call on the expertise of an elf representative). In 40 highway churches, you can get divine assistance for your onward journey. If heavenly assistance alone does not help, there are around 250 police stations to help.
The number of kilometers driven on federal freeways in 1970 was a leisurely 35,000,000,000 kilometers. The mileage increased to 238,900,000,000 kilometers in 2023 [PDF].
Although usage has multiplied, the number of road user fatalities has fallen from 945 in 1970 to 284 in 2024 thanks to many safety features such as seat belts, airbags, and ABS, while the number of accidents has risen from 15650 (1970) to 19460 (2024).
With the rapid increase in traffic volume, the frequency of traffic jams also increased. According to the ADAC, a total of 516,000 congestion reports were counted nationwide in 2024. The length of traffic jams was 859,000 kilometers, and the total number of hours of congestion increased to 448,000 hours.
IT systems for better traffic management
To reduce congestion and better manage traffic, the German government is relying on IT-supported traffic guidance systems to provide better warnings of traffic jams, accidents, and weather conditions and to manage traffic volumes. Traffic guidance systems were standardized nationwide in 2020 in order to achieve better coordination. .
In general, the future is electronic. Self-driving systems are already permitted to a limited extent and under strict conditions. Motorways are ideal for this due to their intersection-free characteristics.
Speaking of electric: the number of electric cars is growing steadily in Germany, but the ADAC still sees room for improvement in terms of the number of electric charging points at service stations. According to a study, e-trucks could also replace combustion engines by 2030.
The German band Kraftwerk also promoted the cult of the autobahn. The album "Autobahn" in 1974 not only marked the beginning of the band's transformation from a typical experimental Krautrock band to the reduced, electronic sounds that inspired countless bands of the 80s, but also their breakthrough. They were particularly successful in the USA. This is possibly because the chorus "Fahr'n fahr'n auf der Autobahn!" sounds similar to "fun fun fun at the Autobahn!". Another misinterpreted German word that makes Americans smile is the term "Ausfahrt" (exit). After all, it is very reminiscent of the English term "fart".
All that remains is to wish you a safe journey at all times and to advise you to look out for a rescue lane the next time there is a traffic jam. Under certain circumstances, this can save lives.
(mawi)
