Coca-Cola asks us to take a pause, according to the sign on the bus, but no one in this photo is ready to do so. The new Europa Center towers in the center left of the scene, while the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church represents old Berlin on the center right. A short distance from here was my favorite sidewalk cafe (one door west of world-famous Kranzler's West Berlin coffee house).
Abandoned streetcar tracks run in the center of the street, with their former private right-of-way being used for auto parking. Buses which replaced them were forced to fight their way into mixed traffic and this made no sense to me. Later, I asked a German city transit official about this in Kassel: "why are the Germans repeating the mistakes of the Americans and the British? Soon you will have our traffic problems." His comment, in German, could be paraphrased as "sometimes people will not understand a problem until they can see it themselves."
The solutions to Berlin traffic problems which were selected versus those which were rejected made an interesting study. As a rule, West Berlin officials of this era went with plans which would make use of the big capital project subsidies offered them. Expansion of the U-bahn system was favored over retention and upgrading of the surface rail network of the strassenbahn. The existing railway network of the S-bahn was neglected due to the peculiar politics resulting from East German (Soviet Zone) control of those lines. In East Berlin, the shortage of capital and the local control of the railways meant that the streetcar network was expanded and the S-bahn network was restored and then supplemented with a suburban train network.
My own interest in this subject grew, and I have been able to apply
a part of what I learned in Berlin to public transportation work 'back
home' in the United States. A person could learn about a lot of things
while having coffee on a Berlin sidewalk. To see where I used
some of my discoveries from Europe,
visit Colorado Transportation Pix, a website under development.
Continue on photo tour. Weitermachen!
Jump to Colorado Transportation Pix.