Geesthacht, January 2023. Mayor Olaf Schulze gives an interview to the Hamburger Abendblatt. Amid the energy crisis, refugee accommodation, and school development, some sentences were spoken that received little attention at the time — but today explain everything.
The 2023 Programme
And further:
And as justification for all of it:
This was not a thought experiment. This was the programme.
Anyone who complains today about sprawling 30 km/h zones, about an ever-growing network of one-way streets pushing traffic through the town, about a municipal policy that systematically marginalises the car and shows no interest in whether you are stuck in a jam — should know: this is not chaos. This is not an accident. This is exactly what Schulze announced at the start of 2023.
More one-way streets. 30 km/h everywhere. More space for bicycles. Less space for cars. Black on white, in the Hamburger Abendblatt, at the start of 2023, under the headline:
"Mayor wants more one-way streets in Geesthacht"
The justification is a future he does not know. Because the car will disappear at some point, it must be stripped of space today. The premise is not demonstrated — it is assumed. And upon it rests a traffic policy that is restructuring an entire city. Ideology!
May 2026: Reality Catches Up with the Vision
Now, some three years later, the programme has become everyday life — and everyday life is chaotic. New traffic regulations have recently come into force in several of Geesthacht's residential areas. In mid-March, no-stopping zones were introduced on Gorch-Fock-Weg in Düneberg and on Hudehof in Tesperhude. In mid-April, new one-way streets followed in parts of Altonaer Ring, Moorkamp, and Wandsbeker Ring. Further streets, including Rothenburgsorter Weg and Barmbeker Ring, are already on the list should the administration's appeals fail to bear fruit.
The official justification: parked vehicles are blocking emergency, rescue, and refuse vehicles. The administration urges residents to rethink their parking habits.
Bernd Reddig, chairman of the committee for urban and traffic planning and member of the voters' association Bürger für Geesthacht, names it plainly: "Shifting the blame onto badly parking residents is too convenient for me." And he is right. Because the real problem is homemade — by the city administration itself.
On Matthias-Claudius-Straße in the district of Grünhof there are 110 residential units but only 60 private parking spaces. Fifty cars are inevitably parked on the street. A parking space regulation that could have created clear conditions was only enacted in Geesthacht in 2022 — decades too late. Reddig puts it in a nutshell: "A restricted stopping zone simply shifts the problem to the surrounding streets."
Particularly striking: while the administration threatens bans on the grounds that refuse vehicles supposedly cannot get through, Reddig notes that the chargeable residual waste is collected without problem, whereas the free yellow and blue bins are not. The same company, the same vehicle. Who still believes this is really only about road widths?
The justification for the entire traffic policy is a future he does not know. Because the car will disappear at some point, it must be stripped of space today. The premise is not demonstrated — it is assumed. And upon it rests a traffic policy that is restructuring an entire city.
The Problem: The Premise Is Wrong.
Autonomous driving needs better roads, not worse ones. Electric cars drive in the same lanes as combustion engines. Ride-sharing reduces parking spaces, not carriageways. The mobility of the future will not replace the car in Geesthacht.
Geesthacht is not St. Pauli, no matter how much the mayor might wish it were. But apparently someone is governing here whose heart beats in the Millerntor and whose traffic policy was imported from the Schanzenviertel. The problem: his voters do not live there. They live here, without an underground, without an S-Bahn, without neighbourhood infrastructure. Here there are commuters, tradespeople, and pensioners. Those who are older here drive to the doctor. All of this happens by car — today, tomorrow, and in 20 years. Schulze has dressed up an ideological preference — more bicycles, fewer cars — in a vision of the future that makes it appear scientific and inevitable. That is rhetorically clever. Politically it is dishonest. People drive cars. That is reality, and it cannot be defined away by cultural saturation or historical narratives about the industrial heritage.
The Creeping Path Towards State Direction
What remains in the end is a deep sense of loss of control. In a political science sense this SPD-led policy nationwide may not be classical central planning, but for the citizen it feels exactly like it. The state does not prohibit the car by law. Instead it uses its sovereignty over public space to make ownership and use so inconvenient, expensive, and nerve-racking that we are supposed to change our behaviour "voluntarily". Parking spaces are removed, lanes narrowed, artificial bottlenecks created. In the end it is no longer the individual who freely decides whether they need a car and can afford one, but the guiding hand of politics that simply plans them out of the city. This is a massive interference in individual freedom, packaged as a necessary mobility transition.
In mid-2026 residents complain that nobody knows what the plan is. Yet the plan has been in the Abendblatt since January 2023.
One only needs to want to read it.
Anyone who restructures a city for a kind of mobility that might arrive, while destroying the mobility that definitely exists, has no vision. They have a hope. And hope is not a traffic policy.
A Personal Note
Dear Mr Schulze, a city must function today. Not in 20 years. Today.
People must get to work today. They drive to the doctor today — often far away, because local healthcare has eroded under decades of SPD policy. They deliver to their customers today, take their children to school today, manage their daily lives today. Not by tram — which is not coming. Not by bus — which often does not run. By car.
It is the middle class that keeps this country running today. The tradesperson, the commuter, the self-employed — they all pay taxes so that cities like Geesthacht can function. And what do they get in return? One-way streets that lengthen their routes. 30 km/h zones that cost them time. Infrastructure that is systematically built against them.
And while you package somersaults on the sports field into nice videos and spread out culture and industrial history for the thousandth time and bask in the applause for it, one wonders: do you actually notice that you are making the AfD stronger in Geesthacht than any other party could, because no local politics in the world can absorb the everyday frustration that your administrative logic produces daily?
You give the impression, Mr Schulze, of thinking as short-sightedly as the SPD's national executive: the present is sacrificed for a future one wishes for but does not plan. Transformation as an end in itself. Restructuring as ideology. A city is not a laboratory. Its residents are not test subjects.
