Transport policy

Collage of transport photos (Source: Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development /pixelio.de)

The Federal Government is pursuing the objective of a sustainable transport policy. This means that transport is to be made environment- and climate-friendly, socially responsible and, at the same time, economically efficient. The mobility we enjoy today and the way in which we shape our transport system must not be at the expense of the mobility and quality of life of our children and grandchildren.

Making transport environmentally acceptable and reducing its climate change impact

We face major challenges here. Forecasts predict that traffic levels will continue to rise drastically, especially freight traffic. It is thus all the more imperative that we make our transport system environmentally acceptable and reduce its impact on climate change. We need a well developed transport system. But transport should have as little adverse impact as possible on our quality of life. That is why the Federal Government has set itself the following objectives in its transport policy:

1. We want to make optimum use of the existing transport infrastructure and make transport efficient, for instance by interlinking the different modes of transport in an optimum manner in the interests of an integrated transport policy and by developing and deploying more electronic traffic management systems.
2. We want to reduce the level of traffic wherever this is possible without having an adverse impact on the economy, for instance by developing smart logistics strategies to avoid unnecessary HGV trips, and by means of a settlement policy which means that people do not have to travel excessive distances.
3. We want to shift significantly more traffic to the railways and waterways, thereby making a major contribution towards protecting the environment and combating climate change. This includes a further improvement of local public transport services in urban and rural areas.
4. There are already noticeable bottlenecks in our transport infrastructure, and the volume of traffic is forecast to rise. Against this background, we will step up our efforts to upgrade the transport infrastructure on a human scale and in an environmentally sound manner. In doing so, we will take account of noise mitigation as well as the interests of environmental protection and nature conservation.
5. We want to further reduce CO 2 emissions and the specific energy and fuel consumption of transport, for instance by incentivizing fuel-efficient vehicles and progressing the development of new fuels and drivetrains that are environmentally friendly and have a lower impact on climate change.

Our goal is to make tomorrow's transport quiet, clean, efficient and climate-friendly.