The Financial Times | August 04, 2017:
As you cross the bridge over the Rhine at Leverkusen you notice something strange. This is one of Germany’s most critical transport corridors, near one of its biggest industrial hubs — yet among the thousands of vehicles that use it every day, there are no trucks.
The bridge has been closed to heavy goods vehicles since 2012, when cracks were discovered in the concrete. A replacement will be opened in 2020. But until then, lorries will have to find other ways across the Rhine.
Marcus Hover is the director of the VVWL, a local transport lobby group, but he says he is glad the bridge broke, calling it “a wake-up call for the whole country” and a monument to Germany’s infrastructure crisis.
To outsiders, Germany can seem like a well-oiled machine. But its reputation as a paragon of efficiency obscures the fact that many roads, bridges and public buildings are in shocking disrepair. Starved of investment for years, a lot of infrastructure is slowly crumbling.
On Thursday, authorities were forced to close another bridge over the Rhine after a crack was found in a cable fixture. Normally some 100,000 vehicles a day cross the bridge at Neuenkamp, which is about 80km north of Leverkusen and one of the most important transport links between the Ruhr industrial belt and the Netherlands.
Hendrik Wüst, transport minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, worries about economic disruption across his region. “When a businessman in Siegerland [in central Germany] can’t transport his wind turbine or transformer to his customer because the bridges are broken, then we have a real problem,” he says. “We risk losing jobs in the fastest-growing rural areas.”
Martin Schulz, leader of the left-of-centre Social Democrats (SPD), has put the infrastructure issue at the heart of his campaign for next month’s Bundestag election. He argues that Germany’s federal, regional and local governments should be spending their combined €56bn budget surplus on fixing school roofs rather than on the tax giveaways that Angela Merkel’s CDU is proposing.
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