Berlin is a hundred days old Transport Senator Ute Bonde (CDU) in office. She took the opportunity to explain to her department in detail for the first time what goals the transport administration should pursue under her leadership. On Monday, the senator sent a comprehensive email to all employees in the department.
The aim of the message is to “provide orientation as to what our common goals and tasks are” and to provide a “guideline” as to “the premises under which we make politics,” says the email, which is available to the Tagesspiegel. First, the Tagesspiegel newsletter Checkpoint reports on this.
The senator divides her message into 10 sub-points and speaks of “ten commandments”. But much of it seems vague. Even after reading the email, which is more than 4,000 characters long, her employees are unlikely to know what the transport senator really wants.
Transport policy must therefore be geared to “the very different needs of the people of our city – above all, it must be designed in a differentiated manner,” writes Bonde.
The solutions are as colorful as our city.
Berlin’s Transport Senator Ute Bonde (CDU) in an email to her employees
The senator sees different wishes among citizens in the city center, on the outskirts and in the surrounding area. Accordingly, transport policy must sometimes be “progressive” and sometimes “conservative”.
However, the CDU politician leaves open what this means in detail in her email to employees. Other passages also make it difficult to tell what exactly Bonde is planning.
The senator points out that the issues facing her department, transport on the one hand and the environment and climate protection on the other, “often seem to be diametrically opposed”. However, they can only be resolved “through cooperation”. But she does not say exactly how: “The solutions are as diverse as our city.”
What exactly Transport Senator Bonde wants is rarely clear
Bonde’s comments to her department’s employees are also not very meaningful in other areas. “Whether on foot, by bike, by car or by public transport: we are all on the move every day. And we move in our shared environment. That makes our department a socially constitutive institution,” writes the senator. “That is why we have a democratic duty to serve the cohesion of our society.”
Bonde does not always manage without platitudes. We must work on “bringing Berlin closer together in order to achieve real cooperation,” she writes at the end. Although the CDU politician also addresses the “times of tight budgets” and the need for “prioritization,” at least in this letter she does not say where these should lie.
She only becomes clearer when it comes to the prices for mobility: “The watering can principle does not work.” This easily explains her rejection of the 29-euro tickets for Berlin Although mobility must be affordable for everyone, “the decisive factor is who needs what kind of financial support.”
