The history of motorways and trunk roads is a special field of knowledge within the realm of history of transport, traffic and mobility. In contrast to the historiography of railways in the 19th century and the automobile history in the 20th century, scholarly studies, for a long time, didn't pay much attention to expand into the historiography of roads as part of the automotive transportation system. .

Besides some monographies, especially concerning the German 'Reichsautobahn', it is rather difficult to get an overview of German and international literature of road history because it mostly is published regarding national issues and partly consists of articles scattered in specialized journals and anthologies. Today, books about road construction in Germany or other European countries before 1933 are almost forgotten.

Thus, scholars, civil engineers and the public have little knowledge of the development of modern road systems in Germany and elsewhere as well as cross-border integration of road transportation routes in Europe.

With the foundation of our scientific community

(Archiv für Autobahn- und Strassengeschichte).

In July 2014 we set out to fill this gap by scholary documentation, research and publication.

Privately funded and not related to universities or institutes, we see ourself as a voluntary 'institution for memory and presentation‘. Our goal is to provide a significant contribution to the history of planning, building, use and consequences of german-european motorways. Reports, pieces, essays, book reviews, commented pictures, glossary and historic calendar are presented on our internet platform. We run three internet adresses:

Research on our platform can easely be done by the feature "quick research", using simple target words (some English, mostly German) as in most Search Engines.

Contacts:

Reiner Ruppmann, redaktion@autobahngeschichte.com

Helmut Schneider, korrespondenz@strassengeschichte.de