Berlin local government will increase speed limit to 50km/h on main roads

Berlin senate representative Dirk Stettner (CDU) has announced that a 50 kilometres per hour (km/h) speed limit will return to the city’s main roads in 2025.

Stettner announces new speed limit for main roads in Berlin

In an interview with Berliner Morgenpost, CDU faction leader in the Berlin Senate, Dirk Stettner, has announced that the city will reintroduce a 50km/h speed limit for driving on main roads.

The changes will be “implemented this year,” Stettner told the local newspaper. The new 50km/h limit will apply on 24 of the city’s arterial roads, including Elsenstraße in Treptow, Friedrichstraße and Postdamer Straße in Mitte, Hauptstraße in Schöneberg, Hermannstraße in Neukölln, Joachimsthaler Straße in Charlottenburg and Tempelhofer Damm in Tempelhof.

The new rules do away with an SPD-Left-Green coalition decision to impose a 30km/h speed limit across the city in 2018. However, even once the 50km/h limit is reintroduced, the 30km/h limit will remain in place during nighttime hours (10pm to 6am). "We want to ensure that Berliners can sleep well,” Stettner explained.

The minister continued that the 30km/h limit will also remain in place on roads where “the health-threatening limit values for noise and nitrogen oxides are exceeded and where road safety requires it, such as in front of daycare centres, schools, senior citizens' [housing facilities] or childcare facilities".

Why was the speed limit reduced to 30km/h in the first place?

Berlin’s red-red-green coalition introduced the 30km/h speed limit as a public health measure in 2018, mainly to reduce noise and air pollution for the city's inhabitants.

According to the city’s Senate Department for Urban Mobility, Transport, Climate Action and the Environment, around 340.000 Berliners are affected by traffic noise above 55 decibels on main roads.

The 30km/h limit helps to improve air quality, which is considered “low” or “satisfactory” on most of the city’s main streets. “This is because [ignition] processes are then shortened and fewer emissions are emitted,” the senate explains.

Speaking to Berliner Morgenpost, a representative from the Association for Environmental and Nature Protection Germany (BUND) criticised the new 50km/h limit and added that slower limits were important to reducing traffic accidents.

Despite the 30km/h limit being introduced in 2018, the number of fatal traffic accidents in Berlin has increased in recent years. In 2020, 50 people were killed in traffic accidents in the capital, 40 people in 2021, 32 in 2022, 33 in 2023 and 55 in 2024. 

People aged over 65, pedestrians and cyclists are the most at risk of dying in a traffic accident in the capital.