Opinion
I'm someone who has lived in Germany for much of my life, in a manner of speaking. With all of my relatives living there, and me visiting sometimes as often as three times a year, I live the real German life during my visits -- in my relatives' guest bedrooms, at their dinner table, going about in their neighbourhoods.
Until this year, the visits were almost always in the bigger and biggest cities: Berlin, Hamburg, and others where walking to the local bakery and taking transit to the nearby train station was the way of life. This is the Germany extolled by marketing.
But now I've spent two weeks in the other Germany, the one you see from the airplane, the tiny villages that dot the green countryside. Many have a population of 500-1000, all have the red tile roofs mandated by law. They might have, at most, a bakery and a bank.
Here's the thing: if you have no automobile, you have no life. The nearest grocery store is a 1.5-hour roundtrip walk, the nearest train station a 5-hour walk roundtrip, 1.5-hours by bicycle. And, as it happened, the one bakery in this village was closed for vacation for the two weeks we were here.
The bus service essentially does not exist; it runs only for the convenience of school children. Cell phone service is a weak E (Edge, or 2G) signal, and inside homes is blocked entirely by their thick concrete-block walls; I cannot receive phone calls or text messages on my Germany cell phone number. WiFi is by satellite link.
It is, as my mother used to say, "As if we are living on the moon."
So, why do Germany's villages thrive? People, especially young people, move to them because these rural place have all that big cities lack:
- Housing is affordable (in the area of $250,000 for a four-bedroom house)
- Homeowners receive compensation from government to settle in villages
- Villagers are always friendly, giving a Hallo or a wave
- No crime, no traffic jams, no air pollution, no other big-city-problems
- Green spaces are a short walk away from any house
But you need a car. Everyone needs a car. Everyone in every family needs their own car. There is no getting away from it. That is something no utopian car-free future can overcome.
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