It's hard to overstate the symbolic significance of the move. Unter den Linden is the most famous street in Germany, a kind of Teutonic Champs Elysées that contains museums, libraries, monuments, a university, and two opera houses. The East Berlin avenue, whose name means "under/among the linden trees", used to function as an east-west highway through the city's heart and was the focus for military parades from the era of Napoleon to that of Gorbachev. Banishing cars from such a central space won't just remove private motorists from the city's tourist heart, it suggests a change of heart that could steadily see such traffic increasingly sidelined.
That such a change is possible is partly thanks to another recent Berlin story covered here on CityLab. The city is currently expanding the U55 subway line, which is bringing back trains from the 1950s, so that it joins up with an existing line that currently begins at Alexanderplatz. This line will run underneath Unter den Linden, and current construction work on the project has forced partial lane closures up and down the avenue. The disruption has already seen car traffic on the avenue drop significantly. Before construction began, 30,000 cars traveled the avenue each day. Now, that number is just 8,000. That decrease is an important precursor to the ban, showing motorists that they don't need to keep Unter den Linden for themselves.
As these cars are cleared out, more space will be freed up for greenery and cycle tracks, with the avenue's famous lines of trees being extended out into the roadway. For anyone who likes cleaner air and walking along a handsome street without fear of being run over, the plan to phase out cars must surely be good news.
For some, however, it doesn't go far enough. A writer for the Berliner Zeitunghas damned the plan as half-hearted, saying that the city is losing a roadway without actually gaining a new pedestrian zone. Tourist buses and taxis will still prowl the street, while surrounding alternative roads could become even more crowded. This argument seems a little defeatist, but there is a good point lurking in there. If it is going to become a true pleasure, Unter den Linden will need more than a car ban.
The street is unquestionably grand, historic, and at least in certain sectionsquite beautiful — but its overall impression is a little drab. Its buildings can come across as heftily official; the sidewalks are undersupplied with humanizing café terraces and oversupplied with tourists. That's not to say tourists are a bad thing, but they're unequally balanced by locals, who tend to promenade elsewhere.
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