Driving in Germany
 

As someone who has lived in Germany for quite awhile I continue to be amazed at the proliferation of road construction projects throughout the country that just seem to take eons to complete. One notable example is the autobahn from Mainz to Frankfurt. If my memory is correct large portions of that road have been under construction since 1999 with seemingly no end in sight. I also drove to Munich recently and passed through the 40 km construction zone on the autobahn from Stuttgart.

I thought maybe I would ask the Germany experts if anyone knows why the construction projects in the country take so long to complete. When I drive to Paris I travel on nice roads practically from the minute I hit France all the way to Paris, often with no slowdowns at all. When I lived and drove in London the roadworks on the M25 were performed at night and in quick fashion.

This isn't a rant, just something I think about often when I am stuck in a stau on my way to Frankfurt airport.

my thoughts were once a company gets the contract , they dig up everything , and them slowly fix it ,
Since its dug up they cannot take the job away from them !

But yes Germany has more roadworks than anywhere I have been ,
and most of them have no one working on them :(

Rally

You're right about that. They spring up like crop circles overnight and you rarely see anyone actually working on them.

I can only surmise why that is. Here are a few assumptions.

Germany has one of the densest road nets in the world.

It also one of the most used road systems. Thus repairs are necessary quite often, as are enlargements. So not all the construction sites you see are repairs, some are actually new construction or to make the road bigger.

The road quality is also very good, better than anywhere I've traveled except Switzerland. Much better than the USA, which I would largely call third world road conditions (the US civil engineer association gave an average degree of D-Minus to the road system, so that should tell you something).

It obviously takes much longer to completely dig up a highway, get rid of the rubble, re-level everything, put proper drainage and then rebuild it with a roadbed that is two to three times as deep as the typical roadbed used in the USA.

The second thing is that the state pays the money and the state is consistently short in change. There are no toll roads and Maut is taken only for trucks. Switzerland, Austria, Italy, England and France all have Maut or toll roads. In France they actually have private companies running the nation's highways. So when there is no more money, work may need to be halted.

The third point is that in order to build a new road there is A LOT of red tape and a lot of resistance from people who live along the proposed road. So it is possible that they start on a project and everything looks like it works out legally and all. But then some farmer gets a particularly inventive lawyer and they cannot continue building.

These are just reasonable assumptions as to why, what is not disputed is the fact that it sometimes feels like the entire country is a construction site. ;)

Till

At least those road construction activities and the caused traffic jams help German airlines to have a high occupancy-rate even on short domestic flights like MUC - FRA (400 km) for making travel-time mostly calcuable.

This sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Maybe the economic crisis has slowed work on these projects also.

I seem to recall the autobahnkreuz at A3/A5 right by FRA being worked on for multiple years.

The A8 between Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and Munich needs and gets a major upgrade and the work isn't very easy. Right now long parts of the A8 have only two lanes and not even a break down lane.

Actually the economic crisis will cause more infrastructure projects because of all the money the governments are investing.

In general highway construction in Germany takes long because the highways have to handle a lot of traffic and need a really good foundation in the ground to last several years. For example the US interstates have much thiner foundation and thiner surface and can be built much faster.

Glad you agree with my thesis. The fact that the roads are better also has the nice effect that one can drive faster while still being relatively safe. I once tried to reach the speed limiter on my car somewhere in the desert between Texas and Arizona on a perfectly straight street. At 144mph (231 km/h) I chickened out; the car was too hard to control. The worst thing though was braking. Because the surface was rough when I stepped on the brakes the wheel was really hard to control. This was in a 2006 Pontiac GTO, a Holden Monaro with the Corvette LS2 6ltr 400hp motor, for the gearheads among you. It would be so nice to have this car in Germany, but then again, we don't have those deserted long roads.

Till

That was probably one of the largest highway constructions in Germany. Two of the major European highways the A5 (North-South) and the A3 (East-West) cross there, then there the new highspeed railway Frankfurt-Cologne was built in the same time and a state highway is crossing the A5 at the same place. They had to manage all these streets and rail tracks while the traffic couldn't be rerouted.

It's good to know that the lengthy timelines are mainly for technical reasons and not political ones. Probably if most people knew the technical details behind what was going on they would be massively impressed. All we see are the cones and yellow stripes.

The choice of car could have something to do with the wobbly feeling... that's the sort of car that gets a little... ahem... makeover in Bremerhaven (the port that handles most car imports into Germany) before the vehicle is released into an environment where it is actually legal to drive the car at speed. Large parts of A 3, A 63 to Kaiserslautern, A 62, A 60 to Belgium and A 48 aren't much better than your average interstate, and not all of them have speed limits (only the truly dire bits do). But your average BMW, or German-built Ford for that matter, do just fine. And they would on the I-10.

My friends in Wiesbaden recently told me that the road to Frankfurt was finally finished? Were they lying to me, or are you talking about a different road? I've suffered through this construction for what seems like a decade and was hoping it was finally completed.

Last time I drove through there was January and it wasn't finished then. In fact, I'm pretty sure they changed the status sign to say 'bis ende 2010'. Maybe they did finish it in the last couple of months though. I've been taking the train to the airport recently to avoid the construction.

This is interesting to me. I am planning a vacation in Germany and will be staying at a hotel near Kamp Bornhofen on the Rhine on our last night in Germany. My plan was to drive from there to FRA in the morning to catch a flight at noon. But reading this I am starting to think about taking a train instead. There is a Hertz place in Bingen where I could drop off the rental car and catch a train to the airport. This is for a family of four with a bunch of luggage so it's kind of a hassle.

Any thoughts? Is it worth taking a train instead? I'd be doing this drive on a Wed. morning and would need to be at FRA by 10:00 am or so. Google estimates 1.5 hrs from the hotel to FRA.