Marina Manoukian looks at the social impact of the protested A100 motorway project…
The plans for Berlin’s Bundesautobahn 100, also known as the A100 city motorway, were drawn up in the late 1940s and finalized in the General Traffic Plan of 1958. But the original plans date back to 1935, with Albert Speer‘s projected plan for Berlin, known as Germania, during the Third Reich. Initially, Speer planned for two Autobahnringe (motorway rings) that would go around Berlin, but later increased the number to four rings encircling the city in gradually expanding loops. As the wonderful book Metropolis Berlin points out, these four rings were also planned to intersect with two axes, running north-south and east-west.
The construction of the A100 ultimately ended up mirroring the second ring Speer designed for the city, and was slowly constructed in 15 stages between 1958 and 2004—although it never managed to run full circle. Passing through Mitte, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Tempelhof-Schoeneberg, and Neukölln until it merges with the A113, the highway goes around Berlin in an unfinished semi-circle, oftentimes running parallel to the Ringbahn.
Planned and largely constructed in West Berlin, the A100 was intended to be completed after German reunification, but plans stalled due to the financial impact it would’ve had on other urban development projects, and the A100’s southern section was barely completed by the twenty-first century. Construction on the sixteenth stage, which spans Neukölln and Treptower Park and brings the A100’s ring back towards the north, began in 2013. By 2017, each meter of the expansion was already costing over 145,000 euros; according to RBB, that cost has more recently increased to at least 220,000 euros per meter, making it “the most expensive road in Germany”. The total cost of the sixteenth expansion is estimated to be around 700 million euros.
In March 2022, as protests and debates over the A100’s continuation slowly seemed to subside, the Bundesverkehrsministerium (Traffic Ministry) announced that the building of the A100 extension was to continue between Treptower Park and Storkowerstraße, known as the seventeenth stage of construction. This proposed section is to run across the Elsenbrücke over the Spree River, follow the Bundesstraße 96a, and up to Ostkreuz, where a tunnel will lead traffic underground to Frankfurter Allee.
The two-tier tunnel, with both levels carrying three lanes of traffic running in both directions, will pass underneath Neue Bahnhofstrasse and Gurtelstraße, following the path of the Ringbahn track, and resurfacing at