My name is Andreas Jüttemann, and I’m a historian specialising in cities, transportation and medicine. Tempelhofer Damm is part of a federal roadway, the B96. It already had number 96 in the Weimar Republic as a long transregional road connecting Zittau in Saxony with Sassnitz on Rügen.

A milestone in Berlin’s transportation system was the approval of a road development plan in 1927. It was the first plan to specify an overall network of roads for Berlin, not only for motorised vehicles but also carriages and cyclists. Tempelhofer Damm was part of it. A novel part of this plan was the introduction of expressways. In 1927 there weren’t yet any priority roads where vehicles had the right of way. They slowly started to be built in 1929. Before then, in the mid-1920s, everyone had to stop at all the crossroads, which meant that traffic flowed very slowly. The idea of roads without intersections, or priority roads, was relatively old. The first candidates included Clayallee in Zehlendorf, Bundesallee in Wilmersdorf and Kantstraße in Charlottenburg. Tempelhofer Damm in Tempelhof was added later. The aim was to have high levels of traffic concentrated on these big arteries. The roads were also supposed to have standardised widths. Trams were to run down the middle of the roads and be as undisturbed by motorised vehicles as possible. The road development plan of 1927 was approved by the Berlin government’s civil engineering office. It called for spending 18 million Reichsmarks annually for the next 15 years to develop the road system. The Great Depression of 1929 held up work for a few years. However, from today’s perspective the plan was a foundational element in Berlin’s urban transport planning, also and especially for the period after the second world war. There were some utopian ideas in 1929 too, such as elevated roads in the centre of the city, and some of the radial roads like Tempelhofer Damm were also supposed to be elevated. The network was to be 50 kilometres long, but there was a shortage of funds especially in the 1920s, and utopian ideas of this type were not put into practice. Which might be a good thing!”

It took only two years to develop the plans for an overall road network in Berlin, which is a very short period of time by today’s standards. In 1950 a general road plan was approved, calling for four bypasses and a ring road. It laid the foundation for later autobahn and main route planning, especially in West Berlin. Residential buildings that stood in the way of the planned routes were promptly declared redevelopment areas and torn down.

West Berliners were delighted with the first autobahn openings. With the student movement in 1968, however, and when the first autobahn segments began dividing entire neighbourhoods, they increasingly questioned whether that was really what they wanted. Ever more citizens’ groups became active. Protests were held, and by the 1980s autobahn openings attracted more big demonstrations than celebrations like those in the early euphoric planning period. The oil crisis of 1973 showed the dangers of excessive dependence on cars. Transport planners in West Berlin always considered the possibility of reunification, meaning that all the roads leading from outer districts into the city centre should later be able to be extended across the city’s borders.