What was once a vital artery in the heart of Dresden is now a glaring symbol of bureaucratic gridlock and crumbling infrastructure. The Carola Bridge, a key crossing over the Elbe River that collapsed without warning last September, likely won’t see traffic again until 2035—despite earlier promises of swift reconstruction.
The bridge gave way in the early hours of September 11, 2024, miraculously injuring no one. But the fallout since has been anything but quiet. Initially, local officials—particularly Stephan Kühn, the city’s head of public works and a member of the Green Party—assured residents that rebuilding efforts would move quickly. Kühn even brushed off the idea of a temporary crossing as unnecessary, banking on a fast-track rebuild.
Fast forward to April 30, and that optimism has all but vanished. Speaking at a city council committee meeting, Kühn admitted there’s still no official completion date. Meanwhile, Sachsen-Energie executive Axel Cunow quietly let slip that internal estimates point to an opening no earlier than the “early 2030s,” with local media now reporting it might be 2035 before the bridge returns.
The reasons? A tangle of red tape and permitting hurdles—though critics suspect there’s more to the delay. Opposition leaders accuse Kühn of dragging his feet in order to alter the bridge’s design, allegedly replacing car lanes with bike paths as part of a larger Green Party agenda.
Public frustration has boiled over. The collapse, and the snail-paced response, have triggered fierce backlash against Dresden’s infrastructure management. Kühn, who just a year before the collapse had dismissed concerns over neglected infrastructure as “baseless,” now finds himself at the center of a political storm.
To make matters worse, the bridge’s absence has thrown Dresden’s traffic into chaos, with daily gridlock grinding the city to a halt. Citizens and commuters aren’t just angry—they’re baffled. Comparisons have popped up across social media, with one user noting that China completed a high-speed rail link between Beijing and Shanghai in under three years. “An industrialized nation that takes a decade to build a bridge is finished,” another commenter scoffed.
Adding fuel to the fire, more than 15,000 residents have signed a petition demanding the bridge be rebuilt in its original 1895 form—a graceful, historic structure demolished and replaced in the 1960s with a utilitarian slab of concrete during East Germany’s Communist era.
Now, with trust in city leadership eroding and traffic snarled for years to come, Dresden’s Carola Bridge stands not only as a collapsed crossing but as a metaphor for Germany’s mounting infrastructure woes.
