THE WESTERN BERLIN BOROUGH of Spandau holds a great example of how far off the rails things can go, even in a transit-friendly place like my adopted home country.
In the German capital, there have been plans in place for a tram in Spandau since 2019, when it was announced that the system -- long a marker of the divide between the old East Berlin and the old West Berlin -- would be expanding significantly into the western parts of the city.
Unfortunately, the automotive Stockholm Syndrome many Germans fall prey to runs deep.
Two conservative parties, the Christian Democrats and the Alternative for Germany, have proposed a ridiculous and dangerous alternative, in a transparent attempt to delay any meaningful rail transportation on the streets of Spandau for another generation.
They want a maglev for a local route connecting Spandau and the former Tegel airport. It’s one of the dumbest ideas ever, for reasons I’ll go into. But that’s partially the point.
Much like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop concept, which has from its conception been purely a scam meant to prevent better projects from being built, the maglev being suggested here is not a good-faith proposal. It is a Gadgetbahn. A Gadgetbahn is a nonstandard, pie-in-the-sky proposal of the type that almost always fails, which is part of the point. Gadgetbahn proposals are usually an intentional enshittification of what should be the straightforward process of building a tram, light rail line or heavy metro route.
We’ve learned the playbook. Any time someone in your local jurisdiction suggests replacing a plan to build a standard-gauge tram system with a monorail or a gondola or a maglev -- using bespoke, vendor-locked, profitable-for-one-company tech instead of the easily repairable, standardized technology that a tram offers -- they are waving a gadgetbahn in front of you, hoping they can delay the process so their luxury cars don’t have to wait a few seconds longer at stoplights for a train to go by with 100 people in it.
A maglev for this route simply doesn’t make any sense. In exchange for their extremely high prices and proprietary technology, maglevs are designed to be able to operate at high speeds. But along a local route like this one, high speeds can never be reached, as the stops are close together, and so nearly all advantage is obviated.
Meanwhile, any maglev project would be likely to come in over deadline and over budget due to its extremely proprietary nature which, again, is the point. Rail transportation opponents want a boondoggle that they can wave around as a failure the next time anyone proposes anything nice be built.
This is Fumbleduck’s Law of Infrastructure writ large. (To review, Fumbleduck’s Law states that any good and publicly beneficial process for which there is a vastly profitable but vastly inferior alternative will be delayed but not stopped by some of the most insufferable characters ever born.)
That’s not to say there aren’t valid worries to be had about certain elements of the tram plan. The removal of trees, for example, has been pointed out by tram opponents as a disadvantage.
But trees can be replaced, and this can even be a positive process if the city-state of Berlin requires that any single removed tree be replaced with two Ersatzbäume.
And as I’ve stated elsewhere, crying tears about trees being cut down for a tram is really rather ludicrous when those tears come from the same coalition that has consistently backed the latest extension of the A-100 Autobahn. It’s disingenuous, and we see through it.
Even in 2026, when other European cities are getting rid of urban freeways, Berlin’s government of auto lobby-befreundet boomers is running full-speed in the opposite direction, eyes clamped shut, pants soiled, Schlager tunes blasting, hammers swinging wildly. They’re demolishing housing to build a sunken road through the center of the city as if it were still 1974 and most people hadn’t moved on from that kind of stuff decades ago. Thankfully, there are voices of sanity.
If you’re a Berliner who finds all this carbrain stuff toxic and demented (as many do), check out the Berlin Autofrei coalition, about whom I’ve written in the past, most recently for Streetsblog. The Autofrei coalition is a group that is getting close to putting a major transit-related measure on the ballot, and they would surely love your help gathering signatures.
Keep pushing, but stay sane, knowing that when things go wrong for transit, it usually has more to do with well funded political sabotage than fault on the part of scrappy local pro-transit organizers. You’re fighting an ingrained system constructed by car, tire and oil companies decades ago with the sole aim of making non-automotive options frustrating, and that stuff takes time to change.
Remember this and hang onto hope.
Yes, it’s true that even the crosswalk buttons are a lie. And yes, there are groups in most major cities ready to dust off what is increasingly becoming a well known playbook to damage transit projects.
But with the knowledge we’re gaining comes the ability to change things.
And that makes us dangerous as hell.
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Highlighted links from this piece:
Selected additional links from this piece:
The Hyperloop Was Always A Scam (Disconnect)
Berlin Will Spend €2 Billion Per Year to Improve Public Transit (Bloomberg)
The Age of Enshittification (New Yorker)
Metro beats monorail as best choice for the Sepulveda Transit Corridor (Railway Gazette)
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Image credit: Guido Gloor Modjib via a Creative Commons license. Full image license information is here.