A recent ruling by the German Federal Constitutional Court, declaring an amendment to the 2021 budget unconstitutional, places a bomb under Deutsche Bahn’s ambitious plan to modernize and streamline the German rail network.
The court’s ruling effectively removes, with the stroke of a pen, 60 billion euros that were earmarked for environmental and climate protection projects across Germany. Including critically necessary upgrades to the railway network.
Missing 12.5 of 80 billion euros
In September, Deutsche Bahn published an ambitious plan to modernize the beleaguered German railway network for 80 billion euros – approximately 335 billion kroner. With the Constitutional Court’s decision, at least 12.5 billion euros are now missing from that plan.
According to Allianz pro Schiene (alliance for rails, ed.), a non-profit organization within the railway sector, the missing billions are deeply worrying:
– In the next four years alone, 12.5 billion euros should come from the fund to upgrade high-performance corridors, which are now missing, says Dirk Flege, managing director of Allianz pro Schiene, in a press release.
Will scrap “environmentally harmful subsidies”
Instead, he proposes to collect the large amount of money by scrapping a number of “environmentally harmful subsidies in transport”, such as favorable conditions for diesel cars and the lenient taxation of company cars in Germany.
– In its coalition agreement, the government has undertaken to reduce subsidies that are harmful to the environment and the climate. Nothing has happened so far. Now is the right time to keep this promise, says Dirk Flege.
A study by the private foundation, Bertelsmann-Stiftung, has recently pointed out that precisely uniform taxes on diesel and gasoline, combined with easing of vehicle taxes and an increased differentiation between internal combustion engines and electric cars, could generate up to 12.5 billion euros annually. That amount exactly matches what Deutsche Bahn now lacks.
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