Referendum for a Car-Free Berlin: Too Radical or Not Radical Enough?

Aiming to reduce traffic in Berlin’s core to make for a more livable urban area, the Verkehrsentscheid referendum is an idea that socialists can get behind. Yet by focusing on the inner city, it may lack popular support from the city’s broader working class.

With traffic deaths in Berlin rising under right-wing mayor Kai Wegner, buses stuck in traffic, and hotter summers, reducing car traffic in Berlin’s core to create a much safer, quieter, cleaner, and cooler — in short, more livable — city is objectively necessary. The Verkehrsentscheid (transport referendum) wants to achieve this by reclassifying most roads inside the S-Bahn ring as “car-reduced”, meaning that private car usage would be restricted to 12 days a year per person. Public services, emergency responders, deliveries, professionals, taxis, and people with physical impairments would be exempted, allowing them to move through the city much faster than today. 

A court ruled in 2025 that the initiative was legally permissible — there is no constitutional right to cars. Now activists need to collect 174,000 signatures by May 8 to get a referendum. If there is a majority of “Ja” votes from at least a quarter of Berlin’s 2.5 million voters, the proposal would become law. So far, just 35,000 people have signed the petition.

A vision for a more livable city cannot be limited to reducing cars. We need massive improvements to public transport — subways, trains, trams, and buses — with new lines and greater frequency, so commuters from the suburbs can easily get into the city without cars, and people in the city can get out into the countryside. Currently, the initiative is not highlighting proposals like free public transit. 

Funding wouldn’t be an issue, at least on paper — car infrastructure is hideously expensive and takes away from more efficient forms of transit. The few hundred million needed for expanding public transit could easily be found by canceling further extensions of the inner-city freeway A100. The last segment cost €721 million for just three kilometers. The Tangentiale Verbindung Ost road through the beloved Wuhlheide park will be similarly expensive. Additionally, reducing car traffic would save society enormous externalities in the form of time delays, pollution, and stress to the tune of €425 million as estimated by the initiative. 

Berlin’s recent governments have been dragging their feet on implementing the Berlin Mobility Act of 2018. For example, just 2% of the planned cycle network has been built while 1960s-style Autobahn projects get the green light. Supported by right-wing media, the AfD and CDU are already campaigning for the city elections in September with false promises of limitless automotive freedom.

Restricting car usage can be a hard sell, especially when large parts of the working class have well-deserved contempt for myopic urban liberals typically associated with pro-cyclist transformations. For workers commuting from the suburbs or looking to escape into the countryside, driving is not a choice but often the only good option. The lack of affordable housing in the city center and spotty public transit in the periphery creates the conditions of mass car dependency. The Verkehrsentscheid focusses on folks in the inner city while measures for those outside of the Ring seem like an afterthought. 

While some mobility researchers call the proposal too radical, it’s actually not radical enough. To succeed, the Verkehrsentscheid would need to speak to all Berlin workers and poor people, both inside and outside the Ring. Demands such as free public transit for all, expanded tram lines, higher-frequency bus service, better shared mobility in the suburbs, progressive parking fees, etc. should be raised in tandem with the scheme for a car-free center. This could generate enthusiasm reminiscent of the wide popularity of the Germany-wide €9 ticket a couple of years ago. 

Mobility justice means expropriating big corporate landlords — which 59% of Berliners voted for back in 2021, but was nonetheless sabotaged by subsequent governments. For-profit housing markets displace people out of the city center, while the declining German car industry uses its lobbying might to block progressive mobility policy. This is what creates car dependency — to end it, we need to expropriate the automotive companies, and retool their factories to make trams and buses for better mobility for all. 

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