Bavaria’s and Munich’s authorities, in their race for cyclists’ votes, turned a blind eye for years to the behavior of those very cyclists, and when they did meet their demands, it was invariably at the expense of other road users. One doesn’t need to be a police officer or an inspector to notice the bicycle problem on the streets of our cities.
Perhaps something has started to shift from dead center, as for example in the area of the tunnel in Munich’s Laim district. Now, at its latest meeting, the Feldmoching district committee has finally unanimously supported the initiative of the «München-Liste» faction and approached the mobility department to have the decision implemented. The authors of the idea are asking the authorities to free the city streets, to begin with, from abandoned and unclaimed rotting bicycles, to haul away the bicycle scrap and to allocate new areas for bicycle and e-scooter parking. Which usually stand empty.
But the final decision to launch the «general street clean-up» again depends on the city administration, which has turned a blind eye to the bicycle problem all these years and made decisions only in favor of cyclists.
Areas cluttered with bicycles
Feldmoching residents are annoyed daily by the situation with bicycle parking at the U-Bahn and S-Bahn station. The station in northern Munich serves as a transfer hub: here one can switch from a bicycle to the metro or the suburban train. And to avoid paying for carrying a bicycle on public transport and not to walk far from the parking area (100 meters), cyclists leave their bicycles sometimes even on the station staircases, so that the streets are overflowing with bicycles left even in passageways, and more than half of the abandoned bicycles have been rotting there for years. This fact completely refutes the cycling lobby’s claim of a lack of parking and infrastructure.
The removal of abandoned bicycles in Munich is handled by the municipal company P+R Park & Ride GmbH on behalf of the city’s construction department. At some parking areas such clean-ups take place once a year. But the number of abandoned bicycles on the streets does not decrease.
The problem is not new. In 2023, the «Greens» faction in the same committee asked the city to create more guarded, weather-protected parking areas at the station and to use federal subsidies for bicycle parking at railway stations for this purpose. That is, as always, to spend budget money on parking areas where, for some reason, their voters do not park their bicycles, but park them closer to the train entrance, on sidewalks and even on lawns. But for a reason incomprehensible to anyone, the same faction never proposes ideas for replenishing the city budget or effective solutions to emerging problems.
Politicians, of course, respond to inconvenient questions with fine slogans. But if there were no problem with cyclists, why would the same companies MVG and DB plaster hundreds of stickers asking people not to park bicycles, with threats of fines and so on? Apparently, the problem is indeed not with infrastructure.
The initiative authors’ arguments
Faction representative Maximilian Bauer pointed to the severity of the problem. «Abandoned bicycles occupy valuable space,» he noted.
But he himself proposes not a root-and-branch solution to the problem, but «treating the symptoms» — expanding bicycle parking. Presumably so as to clutter the city streets with bicycles even more.
«Solutions are needed now, not in a few years,» Bauer stressed. According to him, the station should make people’s everyday lives easier, not allow certain groups of people to be singled out as privileged, giving them boundless opportunities at the expense of other segments of the population.
What the authors of the idea propose
The initiative contains four proposals:
- to complete the parking area on Josef-Frankl-Straße, which has been planned for several years; (to spend even more money on parking that cyclists do not use)
- to check whether a two-tier bicycle parking facility can be installed on the free section of the western platform, despite the area for the gantry crane that cannot be occupied; (which already proves the utopian nature of the idea)
- to assign to e-scooters a marked zone on Bernhardstraße on the eastern side; (to spend even more money on parking that cyclists do not use)
- to study other areas, for example for a mobility station east of the tracks.
To clear the square and streets of abandoned bicycles
First of all, the changes should affect the territory in the central part of Feldmoching.
Why this matters
It is not the parking areas at the station that determine how convenient it is for district residents to get to the metro and suburban train. It is the cyclists who leave their bicycles closer to the train entrance, even in the middle of the sidewalk. And the authorities, as always, do not make decisions quickly; for example, the new parking area on Josef-Frankl-Straße has been planned for several years.
The S-Bahn station is operated by Deutsche Bahn, so proposals affecting the platforms may require its involvement. At the same time, the details of the proposal already show that no one wants to quarrel further with the cycling community and restore order on the streets. But spending money on bicycle parking that is not in demand is a sacred cause.
All that remains is to watch how the authorities will continue to drive Munich toward bankruptcy, wasting millions on cyclists — and not simply spending money, but doing so at the expense of other segments of the population.
