Referendum on the Transrapid planned for 13.Apr.08

Fairly middle managers in MunichRe even travel first class on business trips. Simply incredible. We get business class for flights over 10 hours. Flying Munich-Bangalore takes 9:45 in one direction and 10:30 in the other, and the flights take off/arrive in India at 1am, so guess what class they forced us to travel? Yep, in the back simply because one direction was 15 minutes below the 10 hours.

If your not sure of your return flight times then business class is an advantage. (Otherwise it has always been a con.)

I don't agree with that - it's expensive but then it is more comfortable and means you can attend a meeting a short time after a long flight and be in a more useful mental state than after interminable hours squeezed into a cattle class seat.

Toughen up! If you can't be mentaly on top of your game after doing bugger all for 10 hours then I worry about your stamina.

Good to know they're spending our taxes on essentials...


...and i guess that explains the insurance premiums.

no. but my employer puts a premium on me being in board meetings on time. So dawdling away on the Picadilly line is just not an option. At the end opf the day, an extra €50 on expenses once a month is not going to bring the company to its knees.

Perhaps, but they do reinsurance so not directly related to what you and I pay.

what Hellesangel describes is the policy in my current employer too and in my last employer. Wouldn't surprise me if it is fairly widespread actually in the bluechip world

Easy to say when you're of average height or shorter. Try being 6"4' tall and spending 10 hours with your knees jammed up against the seat in front of you.

The referendum has not yet been called off so mail in your votes. Just to piss of the CSU.
The Federal funds for the transrapid will in all probability not flow to Bavaria now, they will be otherwise allocated. The CSU is blaming the industry, i.e. Siemens, for the cost explosion and indifferently confirms that there is no Plan B, i.e. Express S-Bahn. They have to commence a bidding procedure for a feasiblity study which will take months to terminate, then the expertise has to be written, another few months, and by then it will be too late to commence construction in time for the 2018 Olympics.
Otmar Bernhard, head of the Munich CSU branch, says that the collective hangover will kick in, first and foremost with Lord Mayer Ude, when people realize that alternatives have to be looked for and found, conveniently forgetting that the SPD has been pushing the Express S-Bahn for the last few years.
Rainer Stinner, head of the Munich FDP branch, says that Ude's satisfaction with the sad demise of the transrapid goes to show that he (Ude) is not interested in a practical solution of the transport question, conveniently forgetting (see above).
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 March 2008
The CSU gladly jettisoned the whole transrapid concept as a reaction to their drastic losses in the late communal elections. Their list runs as follows:
Smoking ban - check
Overturn the whole law and blame the Greens and their roll-your-own philosophy
Transrapid - check
Ditch the project and blame the industry
G8 model (8 years at Gymnasium) - check
Strike half the curriculum in such unimportant subjects as geography, biology and history - Who needs them what with new countries declaring themselves independent, constant mutations and we never learned anything from it anyway.
Wake up, German voters, and think!

You forgot: Flaschen pfand: Check

Realise that it is unworkable, blame the shops.

I hadn't heard anything about this... is there a thread to read? I must have missed it.

Maybe not. Basically they introduced the pfand system and because it was so badly thought out, you could only return the plastic bottles or cans to the shop where you bought them from. They had to completely rework it so that you could take them back anywhere.

Well it's good to see that common sense has finally prevailed and that this white elephant has been scrapped. I pointed out in other threads that the €1.85 bn figure was woefully out-of-date. My belief, however, was that industry would wait until construction had started before coming clean about the true costs.

The €1.85 bn figure dates from 2004. In September 2007, the industry announced that the figure was still accurate. Since it is inconceivable that costs have doubled in the space of six months after remaining stagnant for three years, it seems pretty clear to me that the industry was lying through their teeth, while the politicians were woefully incompetent for accepting the figure. Both were blinded by the desire to get the thing built, and believed what they wanted to believe. After the election results earlier this month, the CSU suddenly wanted to wash their hands of the whole thing.

Years have been wasted, but we can now get on with the job of designing a cost-effective, public transportation scheme to provide faster access to the airport – exactly the kind of project that should have been in place when the airport opened in its current location in 1992.

Right, Transrapid down, third runway still to go...

Bayern3 radio, generally on Beckstein's line, called it "political math", i.e. wanting to believe a figure in the teeth of reality.

I think you may be disappointed with that one, but we shall see.

I found out while visiting Berlin, that there you CAN NOT return them anywhere...hell, it was rather difficult for us to find places that would take them, so a lot were thrown away, we really did try at least 2 places each time (a german & I, so no language issue). They claimed there was no requirement to take them, so shove it up your arse.

I like it much better here in Munich, it has the symbol, they'll take it.

They need to get on that express S-bahn planning, I thought a lot of that had already been done...

Blimey, I thought they'd sorted it out now. Bloody hopeless.

@Allershausen: Agree; the third runway is largely a Nimby issue; environmental arguments and the concerns of local residents are overridden by the general public's insatiable desire for cheap flights. The Transrapid would also have been built had the only opponents been those who live close to the planned route.

I know that this is way off tagent, but was it the tedious situation where they refuse to take glass bottles back as the shop itself only sells plastic ones or did you just experience the warm Berliner hospitality that makes us all so proud?

The State of Bavaria was never interested in the Express S-Bahn, quite to the contrary. The government laughed it off as unnecessary as the transrapid would render it redundant and did stuff all to realize its planning.

I was actually refering to the pfand system, but it fits to that as well!

The 2nd one. These were all plastic bottles with the proper symbol.

It's official, the referendum has been canceled by the city council (from muenchen.de):

Transrapid-Bürgerentscheid findet nicht statt
(9.4.2008) Der für kommenden Sonntag, 13. April, angesetzte Bürgerentscheid gegen den Transrapid findet nicht statt. Das hat der Münchner Stadtrat in einer Sondervollversammlung heute einstimmig beschlossen. Da der Stadtrat im Wege eines Ratsbegehrens den Bürgerentscheid beschlossen hatte, konnte auch nur der Stadtrat über eine Rücknahme dieses Beschlusses entscheiden.

What a royal waste of money. The people pushing this should be made to pay for all the money they've cost the system for their idiotic idea.

I've heard somewhere that the associations against the Transrapid played a role in inflating the costs, which is the main reason for the cancellation. I don't know if this is true and how they could do it. Any information?

This has to be nonsense; how indeed could they? The fact is that large projects do continually increase in cost. The predicted costs of the Crossrail scheme in London doubled every two years. The London Olympics are now expected to cost five times the price we were originally told. When industry announced in September 2007 that the cost of the Transrapid had remained at the 2004 level, they were either being exceptionally stupid or lying through their teeth.

Promising legal actions every second day or convincing land owners to sell for the double of the price. things like that.
I just like the idea that the People (capital P) have some sort of power, more than the business (small b ).

Well, that's true, but that is part-and-parcel of every major project. For the third runway at Munich Airport, much more money will be spent on the planning stage than the construction stage. It doesn't cost much or take much time to slap some concrete down onto some fields, but the never-ending series of proposals, consultations, EIAs, court battles and PR takes years and costs a fortune. That should always be clear from the outset though.

CSU lying through their teeth? Please, they are a Christian party!

The final nail in the transrapids coffin has been driven home, the full size model from the airport has been sold for €1! It has been bought by the Max-Bögl company, who built it and designed the track technology. It will cost approx. €100,000 to remove and transport to the companies premises in Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, where it will be put on display.



Link to an article on Bayern Online (in German)

Hahahahahahahahaha Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha Hahahahahahahahaha Hahahahahahahahaha Hahahahahahahahaha Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha Hahahahahahahahaha Hahahahahahahahaha Hahahahahahahahaha Hahahahahahahahaha. Ahem.

Ee that's given me a right good chuckle.

By the way, now the airport wants an ICE connection. (today's Süddeutsche Zeitung e-paper, no link)

And the MVG wants an U6 U-Bahn extension to the airport. But a study says such extension ideas are folly.

Frankfurt and Köln/Bonn already have an ICE link, so no reason why Munich can't have on. But they really, really should have thought of this when building the airport in the first place. They had a blank canvas and messed it up.

The U6 is likely to eventually be extended to Neufahrn, from where you can take the S1 to the airport, but this won't save many people a great deal of time. Extending it to the airport would simply represent yet another slow method to get to the airport. The Express S-Bahn is the only solution, preferably on the S1 line, which is already over-congested and so needs the extra tracks.

S8 is the best line for express. BUt hey I'll mss the idea of getting there quicker. I did drive it in 20 minutes from Gräfelfing last week.

Yes, the S8 line is shorter and it also takes in Ostbahnhof. However the S1 line is already over-congested because it's used by S-Bahns, regional trains and freight trains. The S8 line is a dead-end, at least at the moment, so I can't see how upgrading it will improve the railway network, other than getting faster to the airport people who in many cases could be making their journey by train instead.

haha.. the utter failure of this makes me laugh..

Like you say, Express S-Bahn the whole way.. I don't care if it's on the S1 or the S8..

A long distance train comnnection to the airport isn't likely to be intended for city-airport journeys or even be available for such journeys.

No problemo. Just move Nürnburg 50km east and we're sorted. Airport would be on the way. Suggest it to the CSU and they're probably dumb enough to go with it.

I flew into MUC on May 26th...there was a transrapid demo/propaganda/whatever_you'd_like_to_call_it train on display just outside terminal 2. When I left on the 31st, it was gone.