How do you build a city everyone can access?

Of course, making mobility more equitable is not always straightforward.

Cities are often trying to balance competing priorities like reducing car dependency while also ensuring people can still move around efficiently and affordably.

What are some of the biggest challenges Mannheim faces in creating a transport system that is both sustainable and inclusive?

Yeah, I mean, I already mentioned that we are still kind of very industrial city where we, um, need trucks and lorries and a lot of industry.Um, so we need, uh, in some parts, big streets.

Uh, we have a lot of space competition.

We have a lot of blue-collar workers.

Mm.

This, uh, is, uh, a big challenge, so there's a lot of space competition going on in the city center with the historical dominance also of private car usage with, uh, the space which we need for bike lanes, uh, for pedestrian zones, uh, for green areas, and so on.

Then, of course, as always in mobility, changing habits is one of the biggest challenges you can have because it's not a decision you make every morning to take your car.

It's just a habit.

Uh, raising the awareness that people could use other modes of transport is difficult.

One other thing is, of course, money.

Right.

Cities all over Europe, but especially in Germany, are in a enormous financial crisis.

Uh, economy going down at the moment.

Social expenditures are rising.

Mm-hmm.

We see that politics on a national or European level tend to rather focus on short and fast efforts than ensuring that we have a sustainable funded infrastructure.

Yeah, we see this also with street infrastructure.

We have a lot of big bridges crossing the rivers.

They are important for cars, but they are also connecting us directly to the neighbor cities, um, with our PT system, and we have had now, uh, one of those bridges closed because of damages.

And this, uh, caused an enormous decrease in the usage of public transit because this really made our tram network worse.

And the same goes on with, uh, building barrier-free sta- stations.

We already have 90% of public transport trips in Mannheim start and end at a barrier-free station, which is very good.

But of course, we have some challenges left, and this can be, um, very expensive, but it's absolutely necessary to have an inclusive trip and make sure that not only young and sporty people can use public transport, but also people with handicaps or parents with a trolley, yeah.