Before I was elected to the Bundestag, I was a local politician on the Aachen City Council. There, my focus was on mobility policy. I represented this policy area as the mobility policy spokesperson of the SPD council group from 2014 to 2022.
This is another reason why I remain committed to mobility policy and to working for a sustainable and ecological mobility transformation. For us as the SPD, the social character of the mobility turnaround is paramount. We need fossil-free transportation and propulsion technology, but we need to make it so that everyone can participate in this transformation.
That is why, together with my colleagues in the SPD parliamentary group, I am campaigning for social and sustainable mobility options in the Bundestag.
We introduced the 9-euro ticket in 2022 – originally as a relief measure – which we were then able to continue in the long term as the 49-euro ticket or Deutschlandticket. This is the first time ever that one ticket for public transport is valid throughout Germany. When I was still making mobility policy in Aachen, I could never have imagined that we would reach such a milestone in 2022.
Mobility policy often seems very technical. Complicated terms often hide big changes. The term planning acceleration is a perfect example for this. In this way, we in the Bundestag are increasing the speed with which infrastructure projects can be planned and implemented in the railroads or rail network, for example.
And we have amended the Road Traffic Act to give local authorities more opportunities to regulate local traffic themselves. This is another change that I always very much wanted to see during my time on the Aachen City Council, so that we could decide locally on the best solution for regulating traffic.