BERLIN — Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Trabants still putter past Brandenburg Gate.
They’re no longer streaming across a fallen border, carrying wide-eyed East Germans yearning for their first glimpse of the West. Instead, they’re part of tourist safaris that now use the cars, once billed as the “Volkswagens of the GDR,” as mobile symbols of the city’s Cold War past.
These no-frills econoboxes are juxtaposed against a motley mix of modern-day and future-minded transportation options. Transportation startups are proliferating in Berlin, as founders try to ride the tailwinds of a new mobility law, enacted in 2018, that aims to reduce car dependence and embrace sustainable options.
But the past still reverberates through this German capital. Driving a rented Trabant with 254,000 miles on its odometer on a recent fall evening brought into sharper focus the seismic forces pent up and then unleashed by the Berlin Wall and its subsequent fall, which started 30 years ago this month.
One thing immediately apparent was its convoluted nature. Far from a straight line through the city, it curved, meandered and zigzagged for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Drive around the area near Brandenburg Gate, which President Ronald Reagan used as the backdrop of his 1987 imploration of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall,” and you’re bound to cross the tracks of the wall a half-dozen times.
Further, the spartan condition of the Trabant and its status as a dubious icon hint at the dire shortfall in automotive production in the waning years of the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany.
By today’s standards, the wonky gearshift embedded in the dashboard and the belching fumes that practically overwhelm the driver in a matter of minutes make it a near-untenable form of transportation. It was easy to wonder whether pedestrians were gawking at the Trabi because of its historic status or because they were curious to see if it would fall to shambles at a stoplight.
But in its heyday, the vehicle was in limited supply in East Germany, heightening demand to levels inconceivable in the West. It wasn’t uncommon for the waiting list for the Trabants, made by VEB Sachsenring, to hover around 12 years, creating a phenomenon in which used cars that could be bought soon were more valuable than spots on a waiting list for new cars.
Estimated wait times spiraled to 40 years in the late 1980s, according to “The Vehicle Of Desire: The Trabant, the Wartburg and the End of the GDR,” a 1997 white paper written by the University of California’s Jonathan Zatlin. It was a shortage that was one catalyst for the fall of the wall.
Scarcity “laid the foundations for precisely those social inequalities it loudly proclaimed it had abolished,” he wrote. When government officials conceded the wait time had ballooned to four decades, the announcement was met with “growing incomprehension and increasing criticism from the public.”
Within months, Zatlin writes, images of Trabants streaming through Brandenburg Gate were televised across the globe. For the city, it marked the end of one transportation era and the beginning of another.
“People say, ‘Why do you still talk about the wall?’ ” says Christoph Neye. “Well, everything happened after the wall. Disruption and transition became part of the Berlin DNA.”
Neye is co-founder of Berlin Motion Lab, a maker space that provides guided prototyping for mobility-minded startups. When he opened the space 18 months ago in an abandoned warehouse on the eastern side of the old divide, he had no idea what sort of reception it would receive. He only wanted to follow his desire to see through the unconventional design of a maintenance-free bicycle that contains no chain and rides upon giant 36-inch wheels.
But 35 startups and 100 individuals have bought memberships to the space, which they use to work on projects that run the gamut from e-scooters that never tip to adaptable platforms intended for autonomous vehicles.
Almost unwittingly, Neye tapped into that appetite for disruption. Seventy-five percent of all German startups are in Berlin, which counts a population of 3.7 million people in a country with roughly 83 million residents, according to Berlin Partner for Business and Technology, an economic-development arm of the city.
While many mobility founders say venture-capital funding remains a distant prospect in the city compared with such places as Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, they’re nonetheless trying to reap the benefits of the new mobility law. Among the law’s provisions are bike lanes on major streets and prioritizing public transportation, which begins a €28 billion, or $31 billion, overhaul next year.
At least in some sense, Berliners say, the law is a rebuke for Volkswagen’s diesel emissions-cheating scandal, which was met with widespread anger. Multiple agencies and organizations in the city have set out to install hundreds of charging stations, equip city buses with wireless-charging capability and retrofit sightseeing buses with electric powertrains.
Yet the city hasn’t followed other European capitals and sought a ban of vehicles in city centers.
“Cars aren’t the first choice,” said Henry Widera, head of digitization at BVG, the public company charged with fusing together transportation networks that had been segregated in the West and East.
Indeed, BVG logged more than 1 billion passengers on its railways, buses, trams and ferry networks in 2017, the first time it had crossed that threshold. Only one in three adults in Berlin own cars, the lowest rate of any major city in the country, according to the Berlin Agency for Business and Technology.
Car ownership may not be the primary choice, but cars remain a popular choice. Berlin may be the car-sharing capital of Europe. At least 12 brands offer short-term rental services. In February, Daimler and BMW rolled their short-term rental and other mobility offerings into a joint venture known as Jurbey. Seven hundred employees have moved into a new Berlin headquarters.
While company executives say every car in short-term rental service eliminates the need for 11 privately owned cars and that its users drive an average of 16 percent fewer miles, some still question whether that’s enough to improve transportation, reduce congestion and decrease emissions.
“We have to have less cars,” says Jörg Welke, director of eMo, Berlin Agency for Electromobility.
Along those lines, Berliners are increasingly looking at bikes as a way to diminish reliance on vehicles — delivery vehicles in particular.
In the U.S., a bicycle is defined as having two wheels and human-powered. But the European Commission defines bikes as vehicles with at least two wheels that are propelled by the “muscular energy” of the person riding, meaning that a vehicle boosted by e-power still counts, even with more than two wheels. So operators large and small believe e-bikes outfitted with cargo space can be ridden in bike lanes and parked on sidewalks, in effect, making bikes an antidote to both traffic and emissions.
Transport company Deutsche Bahn, for example, is running a pilot project at a rail station in which shipping containers can be used as storage hubs, where trucks drop packages to be picked up by cargo bikes.
Back at the Berlin Motion Lab, specialty delivery bikes are a popular concept. One startup called Citkar has been working on a covered, four-wheel delivery bike that holds up to 250 kilograms of cargo and maintains a 50-kilometer range on one battery charge. Though it can reach speeds of about 25 kph (15.5 mph), it does not require a driver’s license. It can be ridden in the road and parked on a sidewalk.
As for Neye, the Motion Lab founder, he has shelved his bicycle project. But in a city where such entrepreneurial spirit was once discarded, he is glad to have had the opportunity to have chased the dream.
“It rides terrible,” he said. “But that’s not the point. I had an idea, and I wanted to follow through.”