Erich Schubert: Dritte Startbahn - 2 gewinnt!
Usually I don't post much about politics. And this even is a highly
controversial issue. Please do not feel offended.
This weekend, there is an odd election in Munich. Outside of Munich,
nearby the cities of Freising and Erding, there is the Munich airport. The
company operating the airport is owned partially by the city of Munich, which
gives the city a veto option.
The Munich airport has grown a lot. Everybody who has been flying a bit
knows that big airports (such as Heathrow) are oft the worst. If anything
goes wrong, you are busted, because it will take them a long time to resume
operations. This just happened to me in Munich, where the luggage system was
down, and no luggage arrived at the airplanes.
Yet, they want to take the airport further down this road, and make it
even bigger: add two satellite terminals, and a third runway. I'm convinved
that this will make the airport much worse for anybody around here.
The security checkpoints will be even more crowded, the lines for the baggage
drop-off too, and you will have to walk much further on the airport.
Up to now, the Munich airport was pretty good compared to others.
In particular given that is is one of the largest in Europe! It is because
it had been designed from the ground up for this size. Now they plan to
screw it up.
But there are other arguments against this, not the egoist view of a
traveller. The first is the money issue. The airport is continuously making
losses. It's the taxpayer that has to pay for all of this - and the current
cost estimation is 1200 million. This is not appropriate, in particular since
history shows that you can take this x2 to x10 to get the real number. They
should first get the airport into a financial stable condition, then plan on
making it even bigger.
Then there are the numbers. Just like with any polticial large-scale
project, the numbers are all fake. The current airport was planned to cost 800
million, in the end it was about 8550 million. The politicians happily lie
to us. Because they want to push their pet projects. We must no longer
accept such projects based on fake numbers and old predictions.
If you are already one of the 10 largest airports in Europe, can you
really expect to grow even further?!? There is a natural limit to
growth, unless you want to have every single passenger on the world first
travel to Munich multiple times, then go to his final destination ...
One thing they seem to have completely neglected is that Berlin is
currently getting a brand new airport. And very likely, this is going to
divert quite some traffic away from Munich. Just like the Munich
airport diverted a lot of traffic away from Frankfurt. To some extend because
many people actually want to go to Berlin, not Munich, but they currently
have to change planes here or in Frankfurt. So when Berlin finally is
operational, this will have an impact on Munich.
And speaking of the Berlin airport, this is a good example to not trust
the numbers and our politicians. It is another example of a way-over-budget,
way-behind-time project the politicians screwed up badly and where they lied to
us. If we should not have trusted them with Berlin, why should we trust them
with the Munich addon?
A lot of people whose families have been living there for years will have
to be resettled. Whole towns are going to disappear. An airport is huge.
Yet, they cannot vote against it, because their small towns do not
own shares of the airport. The polticians don't even talk to them,
not even to their poltical representatives.
Last but not least, the airport is in a sensitive ecological area.
The directly affected area is an European special protection area for wild
birds. There are nature preserves nearby, and all this area already suffers
badly from airport drainage, pollution and noise. When they built the airport
originally, the replacement areas they setup were badly done, and are mostly
inhabited by nettles and goldenrod (which is not even native to Europe).
See this article in S ddeutsche Zeitung on the impact on nature. You can't replace
the loss of the original habitats just by digging some pools and filling them with water ...
If you want more information,
go to this page, by Bund
Naturschutz.
This is not about progress ("Fortschritt"). That is a killer
argument the politicians love, but it doesn't hold. Nobody is trying to
shut down the airport. Munich will be better of by keeping the
balance having both a reasonably sized airport (and in fact, the
airport is already one of the 10 largest in Europe!) and preserving
some nature to make it worth living here.
If you are located in Munich, please go vote against the airport
extension, and enjoy the DEN-GER soccer game afterwards. Thank you.