Monday, December 6th, 2021
“I could have negotiated”
Scheuer blaspheme about traffic plans of the traffic lights
Andreas Scheuer sees himself confirmed: The transport chapter of the coalition agreement between the SPD, Greens and FDP shows that he has done a lot of things right. The outgoing transport minister complains about “cold coffee” in the ideas for Deutsche Bahn – and looks back on the failed car toll.
The outgoing Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer sees little new in the traffic light coalition’s plans. If he read the traffic chapter of the new coalition agreement, “then I could have negotiated it,” said Scheuer of the “Passauer Neue Presse”. “The continuity shows that I must have done a lot right,” he said.
He criticized that only four and a half lines were devoted to cycling. “That is a complete disappointment,” said Scheuer. The fact that the traffic light wants to put more money into rails than into roads for the first time and that the rail infrastructure units no longer have to make a profit is what he called “cold coffee”. The traffic lights sit on issues that have been decided and sell them for new ones, “but we made the decisions,” he said, referring to the coalition agreement between the Union and the SPD after the previous election.
In retrospect, Scheuer gave a critical assessment of his approach to the failed car toll – because he had not acted decisively enough against “incorrect information”. “Contrary to what many think, not a single euro has been paid in damages so far,” he emphasized. The arbitration proceeding and “we have very good arguments”. As a simple member of the Bundestag, he wanted to be “opposition politicians with as much legroom as possible,” announced Scheuer.
The car toll promoted by the CSU failed in 2019 before the European Court of Justice. Opposition politicians have described this as predictable; they accused Scheuer of wasting taxes and repeatedly called for his resignation. Instead of the promised annual additional income of hundreds of millions of euros, the federal government is threatened with high compensation payments to the operating companies.