Constitutional Court allows referendum: Will Berlin become car -free?

Constitutional Court allows referendum: Will Berlin become car -free?

A pioneering step for transport policy in the capital: The Berlin Constitutional Court has declared the “Berlin car -free” referendum permitted. The court decided that the initiative can continue to pursue its legislative projects, which makes many traffic activists breathe a sigh of relief. Berlin could change this judgment in the coming years. For example, the initiative largely wants to ban private car traffic within the S-Bahn ring, and residents can only use their cars on a maximum of twelve days a year, which is known as a slot regulation. Tagesspiegel reports that the Senate of this project as constitutional assessed.

The President of the court Ludgera Salting emphasized that the court did not decide on the question of whether Berlin really becomes car -free, but only about the admissibility of the multi -stage procedure for citizen participation. It is interesting that the judges saw no disproportionate restriction of civil rights and thus did not consider the rights of citizens to be at risk in the context of the traffic design. After all, the use of public roads is not an absolute right. A vote on the referendum could soon be due, because to take the next step, the initiative must collect at least 170,000 signatures within four months. A successful referendum would subsequently have a referendum in which a majority of the votes and a quarter of all voters must agree. SPIEGEL added that the initiative already over 50,000 in summer 2021 Has collected signatures to get the process going.

But the project also contains challenges: judges pointed out that the regulation pursued high -ranking common good goals, but expressed concerns that the implementation could occur in the implementation of local public transport (public transport). The Berlin Senate argued that the law intervene in federal competence in road traffic law and thus possibly violates the Basic Law. However, these objections were not sufficient for the court to stop the referendum. rbb24 reports that the negotiation lasted almost four hours and around 80 listeners were present.