today’s spiegel online reports that the probably soon to be german finance minister peer steinbrück plans to sell off germany’s autobahns to close gaping canyons in the german budget.

interesting. how much is a piece of autobahn then? according to the article the lowest estimate is a whooping (or not so whooping) €127’000’000’000 for all of the roughly 12’000km of german autobahn. which, more or less, comes down to €10’584/m.

so…if i were to buy 10m of autobahn (does it come with or without signalisation BTW?) that would set me back about €106’000. what i would do with 10m of autobahn? that, as the cautious engineer is wont to say, depends…

here are the options:

• if it close to where i live, i’d turn it into a walled garden.
• if it’s not close to where i live, i’d build a lovely toll station (just for those 10m, of course) complete with very nice and easy to use money drop-off points, soothing colours and an viewing platform complete with café — all very user friendly.

what do you mean that this is what the highwaymen did? no, no, no. i wouldn’t be threatening anyone. besides those would-be-users of my would-be-toll-station would get a service for they money: i’d be optimising their fuel consumption (i leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure that one out :-)

p.s.: it seems the SPD’s coalition partner, the CDU, has got wind of my plans: they are against selling the autobahn now…oh, well.