Robert Otzen

Robert Friedrich Ehlert Otzen (9 May 1872 in Giesensdorf - October 3, 1934 in Hanover) was a German infrastructure engineer.

He is considered the inventor of the word Autobahn when he was head of the Stufa car lobby group (Bahn being the German word for railway),^[1] the equivalent of motorway (British English) or freeway (US English).. When a single high speed roadway was built on the Hamburg-Frankfurt-Basel route, Ozten felt that only an entire network of such roads would attract the political support needed for such a project to be built.^[2]

References

1. "Autobahn has made inroads to German imagination since 1932". Irish Times http://www.irishtimes.com. August 9, 2012. Retrieved 2012-10-15. External link in |publisher= (help)
2. Vahrenkamp, Richard (2012). [Google Books, http://books.google.ca/books?id=slzBArFATL4C&pg=PA135&lpg=PA135&dq=Robert+Otzen+autobahn&source=bl&ots=CLePJ1ms8o&sig=XPwn4aumpiVl5ryn3hsayPIXdY0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Rbl8ULvpD8200QHqwoHQCQ&ved=0CEwQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Robert%20Otzen%20autobahn&f=false The Logistic Revolution: The Rise of Logistics in the Mass Consumption Society] Check |url= value (help). Frankfurt: Josef Uhl Verlag. p. 135. ISBN 978-3-8441-0118-8. Retrieved October 16, 2012.

This article has been translated in part from the German Wikipedia equivalent.