The need to plan traffic in cities over the long term has always been one of the most important tasks of municipalities.

This is particularly true for cities in metropolitan regions such as the Rhine-Main area.

The central topic of climate protection places new and higher demands on the planners in terms of time and quality.

The city of Offenbach wants to do justice to this with a traffic development plan that should be drawn up by the end of next year.

Jochen Remmert

Airport editor and correspondent Rhein-Main-Süd.

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The plan is to lay down the municipality's strategy for developing inner-city traffic over the next 15 years or so.

In principle, the city council decided this in January, now the city council has decided to award the planning to an engineering office.

Reduce pollutants from engines

For planning department head Paul-Gerhard Weiß (FDP) it plays a particularly important role in view of climate change to reduce the pollution of the air by CO2 and other pollutants from internal combustion engines, as he said on Wednesday.

It is also about preventing car traffic in the city from growing further, otherwise there is a risk of traffic collapse.

However, Weiß is also aware that this only works if the city also offers other reliable mobility options. On the other hand, Weiß and the planning office are certainly also aware that in Offenbach, for example, commuters and commuters play a significant role, for whom local public transport is not an acceptable solution even with maximum expansion. For the settlement of new companies, which is essential for the economic recovery of the city, not only good local transport connections play an important role, but also sufficient parking spaces for employees' cars. According to reports, the establishment of a company from the aviation sector has also failed recently due to a lack of parking spaces.

The basis for the preparation of the Transport Development Plan 2035 are three scenarios that show how inner-city mobility in Offenbach could develop in the next 15 years.

The first so-called trend scenario is based on the assumption that the private car will remain the dominant means of transport even in the city, with environmentally neutral forms of drive developing rather slowly.

From a climate protection point of view, this is the most unfavorable forecast scenario.

Pedestrians set standards

The second scenario, on the basis of which knowledge is to be gained for a traffic development plan in 2035, assumes that individual traffic with cars will continue to dominate, but will quickly be converted to largely environmentally neutral forms of drive.

The third scenario assumes that local public transport, bicycle traffic and pedestrians set the standards for traffic in the city.

With these three scenarios, the planners should be able to take the changing mobility behavior into account, as Planning Department White said.

The traffic development plan 2035 is also a kind of update of the traffic management plan 2015, which was drawn up in 2007.

Probably as evidence that Offenbach is also implementing such long-term plans, Weiss pointed out that the vast majority of the goals that were set at the time to improve cycling in Offenbach have now been realized.