The SPD group in the city council wants these terrace sites (Schanigärten) to serve during those months as delivery zones and as parking for home maintenance and repair specialists and outpatient care services. At night, according to the authors of the proposal, residents of the surrounding buildings could park there.
Street terraces have to be dismantled in winter anyway
In summer, terraces extend the area in which catering establishments serve guests outdoors, and by winter they have to be removed in any case. The Social Democrats propose not turning the vacated spaces into ordinary parking, but expanding the existing network of 3L zones. The name stands for “Laden, Liefern, Leisten”, that is, loading, delivery and carrying out work.
Which spaces are to be used is to be decided together with the district committees. If the 3L zones are not needed at night, these sites could be used mainly for parking by residents of the district.
In addition, the group asks the city administration to examine whether the following could be permitted to use bus lanes:
- craft businesses;
- outpatient care and social assistance services;
- postal and courier services.
The condition: public transport must not deteriorate as a result.
But our politicians, as always, do not know what is really going on in the streets: the spaces already designated for delivery and servicing are always occupied by private cars, which are often parked for weeks on end, taking up spaces that are important to the city and its residents. It is therefore unclear how they intend to solve the parking problem for service companies.
Proposal to preserve establishments’ rights to their terraces
The Social Democrats stressed that terraces should retain their current status, and that cafés and restaurants should not face difficulties obtaining approval for the next season. These sites are already familiar: from May to the end of September 2020, almost 1,100 applications to extend or create terraces were submitted in Munich, and almost 900 of them were approved. In November 2021, on the proposal of the Greens and the SPD, the city council allowed terraces to remain in place over the winter, but the CSU objected at the time, fearing the loss of parking spaces.
SPD city councillor Felix Lang said that craft businesses, outpatient care services and courier services often find it hard to find a place to park, especially in the city centre. “Good solutions are needed for this: additional 3L zones will not only make things easier for businesses, but also reduce the journeys made in search of parking. This will benefit residents,” he believes, without even suspecting that the parking spaces already designated are always occupied by ordinary citizens, while courier services and other service companies are forced to park in violation of traffic rules, often even blocking roadways and pavements.
Why this matters
Parking spaces in Munich remain a subject of dispute between drivers, residents, establishments and those who work on the road. The SPD’s proposal attempts to reconcile these interests by using space that stands empty in winter, while not depriving cafés and restaurants of their rights to terraces. But their proposal is utopian, for the deputies should come down to earth, go out into the street and see for themselves how all their ideas work, or rather do not work, creating still more problems in the city instead of solving its main problems.
That is, instead of obliging construction companies, as is done in other countries, to build underground car parks with access for service companies and specially designated parking, thereby freeing the streets from the clutter of service vehicles, our representatives in government are playing at childhood games and trying to distribute utopian quotas, sometimes at the expense of other participants in street life.
For now this is only an initiative of the SPD group. In future the city council will have to decide whether to adopt this idea and aggravate the problems on the city’s streets, and the city administration will have to answer whether bus lanes can be opened to craft and courier services without harming public transport.
