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.

Roads in the US are an embarassment. I saw a special on Discovery or TLC or one of those channels about the AutoBahn network - it really is amazing how far behind we are.

I would just leave early enough in the morning to offset the chance that you might hit a stau. You should be good until you hit Mainz, then traffic gets a bit heavier heading towards the airport. But between Bingen and Mainz you shouldn't really get much traffic at all. Does Hertz have a drop off in Mainz? I would just pad your time a little and get to the airport a little earlier. For what its worth, the roads and directions to the airport are marked quite well.

+1 to just leaving a little earlier. Turn in the car at the FRA airport. It is too much hassle to do the public transport thing with four people and luggage while you still have to be on time. Plus, who knows what kind of connection you'd get anyway? Might be that you'd have to leave even earlier than taking the car.

OT!


Tom, what do you mean? Do you mean this type of car would have its suspension tuned before being allowed on the road in Germany? I don't get you. I really think the suspension is fine. Not as good as a BMW but definitely on par with a Ford. Quite sporty and firm. Steering ratio could be more aggressive for my taste but road feedback and steering feel are very good.

I don't think I ever traveled on the roads you mentioned so I have no reference there.

I also don't think my car ever saw Bremerhaven. It got imported directly from Australia to the USA. They did change the gas tank location for US safety norms, which sucks because now the tank takes up half of the trunk.

Otherwise, I love the car. It is rather well made, has a nice design (when the wing is taken off like I did), is very comfortable and is as fast and quick as a Porsche 911 or BMW M3 but with even more torque. Obviously, it doesn't reach anywhere close to these two cars in handling and prestige but one has to remember that it costs only 1/2 or 1/3 of the other two.

Besides that, being a German in Texas and driving an American muscle car has a nice exotic flair. Good story to tell back home. ;)

Till

As others have said, by all means do not take the train if you have a large family and luggage. The trains themselves can be confusing if you aren't paying attention. For example, one day I got on a regional (slow) train instead of the ICE (fast) train. Both were headed to the same destination within minutes of each other from the same platform. As a result I missed my connection and had to wait an hour for the next train.

In another case I was sitting comfortably on the train with other passengers waiting to depart when after awhile the conductor came on and told us surprisingly to get off. When we got outside we saw that they had decoupled the front half of the train and just left us there!

You shouldn't have any problems driving if you just leave early enough.

The A66 between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt is done. Very nice to drive now.

Don't forget that Germany was also the country where the first Green party came about - and Green parties do not like roads. Whereas 20-30 years ago a new stretch of motorway could be built quickly, these days you need to consider and compensate for the disturbances to all sorts of ecosystems... :rolleyes:

Road-enthusiasts in Germany often lament the influence of what they call the 'eco-fascists'. For example, the missing part of the A143 in Saxony is will not be built for years (litigation tied up in the courts) because it runs through... an area with an abundance of porphyry, a type of igneous rock!!

Thanks!
 

Thanks all for the advice - I'll stick with my original plan of driving to FRA. Getting on a train with kids and luggage and then finding seats and places to stow the bags can be pretty stressful (we've done it before several times).