The Greens politician Wolfgang Siefert was elected the new head of the mobility department for the city of Frankfurt on Thursday.

In the city council, the fifty-three-year-old received 48 of the 85 votes cast in a secret ballot.

Siefert, who is currently still working as a personal advisor for mobility in the Department for Mobility and Health, was nominated by the Roman coalition of Greens, SPD, FDP and Volt.

He has been elected full-time head of department for six years.

Ralph Euler

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung, responsible for the Rhein-Main section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Siefert is to succeed Stefan Majer (Die Grünen) as head of transport on July 8th.

Majer, who then left the magistrate after two terms of office at the age of 65, was Head of Transport from 2011, Head of Health and Human Resources from 2016 and has been Head of Mobility and Health since autumn 2021.

As a consultant, Siefert has been in charge of the traffic department in a team with City Councilor Majer for a year and a half.

This unusual constellation came about because of a statute of the Greens for the advancement of women.

Originally, the Roman coalition had already planned Siefert in autumn 2021 as the direct successor to Klaus Oesterling (SPD), who was then head of the transport department.

However, it was important for the Greens to first elect a woman, which is why the coalition finally chose Majer's office manager Elke Voitl (Die Grünen) as head of the social affairs department.

With Majer's departure from the magistrate in July, Voitl will also take over the health department.

After taking over the mobility department, Siefert wants to continue the cyclist-friendly policy in the city.

His party does not want to ban driving, he said in a recent FAZ interview.

The aim, however, is that in the foreseeable future only those who really need a car will come to the city.

In Frankfurt there are more and more people who are out and about by bike or on foot.

Nevertheless, the car still takes up 80 percent of the road space.

"So we have to redistribute."

Before his election, Tina Zapf-Rodriguez, leader of the Greens, said that Siefert was an “experienced mobility politician”.

The SPD parliamentary group leader Ursula Busch stated that the Green candidate had "a real passion for transport policy".

He should use this quality in his future office to ensure, for example, that Mainkai is permanently car-free and that there are more park-and-ride spaces on the outskirts.

CDU faction leader Nils Kößler, on the other hand, sharply criticized the coalition's transport policy.

There can be no talk of an urgently needed overall plan that takes all modes of transport into account.

"The only thing you can do is paint red paint on the road for bicycle lanes," Kößler told the four coalition factions.

What Frankfurt needs is “a mobility policy supported by the general public”.