Taxi to Preetz: straight there, without the detour through Kiel

Why people take a taxi to Preetz

Preetz sits about thirty kilometres southeast of Neumünster, in the Kreis Plön. A Kreis is a rural district, the tier of German local government that runs the hospitals, the schools and the bus company for a group of towns and villages, and Preetz is the largest town in this one. Kiel, the state capital of Schleswig-Holstein and the port most cruise passengers arrive at, lies roughly twenty kilometres to the northwest. Hamburg is about a hundred kilometres to the south. On a map the gap between Neumünster and Preetz looks like nothing at all, and in a car it is. Without a car it is a different matter, because no train and no bus links the two towns directly.

Everything public goes by way of Kiel Hauptbahnhof, the main station in the state capital. First the RE 7 or the RE 70 north to Kiel, for which the timetable allows eighteen to twenty three minutes. Then a wait on the platform of twelve to twenty two minutes, depending which pair of trains you catch. Then south again on the RE 83, which needs a good quarter of an hour from Kiel down to Preetz, or on the RB 84, which takes a little over twenty minutes for the same stretch. Line up the best connection and you are looking at around forty five minutes. Line up a poor one and you are past seventy. Those figures come from the timetable in force as this page was written, so treat them as a snapshot and check them yourself before you travel, because German timetables are revised and this one has been revised before.

The reason the journey is so awkward has nothing to do with the distance and everything to do with where the tracks were laid. Preetz stands on the railway from Kiel to Ascheberg and onwards towards Lübeck, opened in 1866, and that line does not touch Neumünster at any point. By road it is barely thirty kilometres to the southeast, straight across the farmland, instead of a wide arc up through the state capital and back down again.

Then there is the last part, once you are actually in Preetz. From the Bahnhof, the railway station on the Bahnhofstraße, it is still a solid walk to the Klosterhof, to the hospital or up to the Kührener Berg. If you are carrying luggage, if you have an appointment early in the morning, or if you are travelling with somebody who is unsteady on their feet, a trip that looked like an hour has quietly eaten half the morning. We take out the detour through the state capital and drive the whole way in one piece, up to the door of the address you give us.

Where we drive in Preetz

Preetz has no official Ortsteile. In most German towns an Ortsteil is a named district with its own boundary, and people give it instead of a street when they order a taxi. Here there is none to give. The town is a single piece and gets sorted by streets and by quarters, so tell us a street and a house number if you can, or at least the quarter, and the driver will know exactly where to pull up.

The tightest cluster of destinations is around the Klosterhof, the walled precinct of the Adeliges Kloster with its Klosterkirche. The Kloster is a foundation for noblewomen rather than a working monastery, and its courtyard and church are what most visitors come to Preetz to see. Next to it lies the town centre, with the Markt and the Kirchenstraße, the Lange Brückstraße, the Mühlenstraße and the Gasstraße. On the Bahnhofstraße the station, the ZOB, which is the central bus station where the local lines meet, and the Rathaus, the town hall, all stand within sight of each other.

As a home address, passengers most often give us the Ostland-Siedlung with the Königsberger, Marienburger and Tonderner Straße, and after that the Berliner Ring, Kahlbrook, the Wundersche Koppel or the Postseefeldmark out on the edge of town. None of these is far from the centre in kilometres. All of them are far enough on foot with shopping or a suitcase.

The single most frequent destination is the Klinik Preetz, the district hospital of the Kreis Plön, which has the Zentrale Notaufnahme, the central emergency department for this part of the district. Right beside it stands the AMEOS Klinikum with its Tagesklinik and its Institutsambulanz, terms explained further down this page. On the same site are the Medizinisches Versorgungszentrum, a group practice run by the hospital, and the Ärztehaus, a building of independent consulting rooms, along with the Förde-Radiologicum for imaging and the Augenzentrum for eyes. We also drive regularly to the four residential and nursing homes in the town, among them the Haus der Diakonie by the old courthouse building known as the Alte Amtsgericht.

For the schools it is the Friedrich-Schiller-Gymnasium on the Ihlsol, the Theodor-Heuss-Gemeinschaftsschule on the Castöhlenweg with its second site on the Hufenweg, the Friedrich-Ebert-Schule on the Lohmühlenweg and the Hermann-Ehlers-Schule on the Max-Planck-Straße. The two branches of the Berufsbildungszentrum Plön, the district vocational college, sit on the Kieler Straße and on the Kührener Straße, and the Förderzentrum for pupils with additional needs is on the Kührener Berg as well.

For sport the names that come up most are the Fichtestadion, the Jahnplatz, the Blandfordhalle, the indoor pool on the Johannes-Gutenberg-Straße and the Strandbad, the lakeside bathing beach on the Lanker See. Anyone coming on business almost always wants the Gewerbegebiet, the commercial and industrial estate laid out along the B 76, where among others the Frank printing works is based and where the town counts well over two hundred businesses.

The road from Neumünster to Preetz

There are two sensible ways to do it and they take much the same time. The shorter one runs across country: out of Neumünster along the Tasdorfer Weg, onto the L 67 and then the L 49, past the village of Kirchbarkau and into Preetz from the west. That is around thirty three kilometres and about forty minutes. The other takes the B 430 east, then the A 21 motorway north as far as the Klein Barkau exit, or Nettelsee if that one is closed, and finishes on the L 49 heading east. By motorway the distance grows to roughly forty five kilometres and almost nothing is gained on the clock. In practice we reckon on forty to fifty minutes, and the driver picks between the two lines on the day, according to the time and where the roadworks are.

The landscape changes as you go. Past Kirchbarkau the ground starts to roll and the water starts to appear, because that is the edge of the Holsteinische Schweiz, the lake country of eastern Holstein that gets called the Holstein Switzerland. Preetz describes itself as the gateway to it. The town is wedged between three lakes on the river Schwentine: the Postsee to the northwest, the Kirchsee in the middle of the town itself, and the Lanker See to the south.

Getting through the town has been straightforward since June 2004, because that is when the B 76 stopped running through the middle of Preetz and was moved onto a bypass around the eastern side. The Gewerbegebiet sits directly on that bypass, which is why lorries and business traffic no longer come past the Markt. In the east the L 211 joins the B 202 at the junction called the Rastorfer Kreuz, and in the south the old road meets the new one again at the Sophienhofer Kreuz.

One more thing about the local nickname, because it turns up on signs and posters all over the town and it puzzles visitors. Preetz calls itself the Schusterstadt, the shoemakers' town, and the word comes back in the names of its walking route, its town festival and its road race, all mentioned further down. If somebody in Preetz tells you to meet at the Schusteracht, they mean the circular path around the town and not a shop.

When we drive to Preetz most often

Most of our journeys have something to do with the two hospitals. Appointments at the Klinik Preetz tend to be early in the morning, while discharges come without warning in the afternoon, and the day clinic at the AMEOS Klinikum produces journeys that repeat every working day for weeks on end. If a German health insurer is paying for such a journey, it runs on a doctor's authorisation and not on the fixed price shown on this page. How that works is set out on our page about Krankenfahrten, the German term for medically necessary transport.

Beyond the hospitals the week has its fixed points. The Wochenmarkt, the open air weekly market, is held on the Markt on Wednesdays and Saturdays from eight in the morning until one in the afternoon, and it is mainly older passengers from the surrounding villages who book a car for it. The Heimatmuseum, the local history museum on the Mühlenstraße, opens only at weekends and then only in the afternoons. The Kunstkreis gallery on the Gasstraße opens from Friday to Sunday while an exhibition is running. Getting any of those wrong means standing in front of a locked door, which is why we mention the pattern rather than quoting opening times that can change.

In summer we drive out to the Strandbad on the Lanker See, drop canoeists at the Schwentine and bring groups to the start of the Schusteracht, the circular path around the town. In winter it is more often the Capitol Cine Center on the Kirchenstraße, the Niederdeutsche Bühne, a theatre company that performs in Low German, the old regional language of the north, and the paper theatre festival run by the Volkshochschule, the adult education centre. For the way home late in the evening, a lot of people would rather book us straight away than gamble on making the change of trains in Kiel.

Journeys to the Klinik Preetz and the AMEOS Klinikum

The town's two hospitals stand on the same street and effectively on the same site. The Klinik Preetz has the address Am Krankenhaus 5, the AMEOS Klinikum is number 5a. The district hospital has existed since 1851 and has been owned by the Kreis Plön since 1996. It has 172 beds and four departments: internal medicine, trauma and joint surgery, abdominal surgery, and gynaecology with a maternity unit. In a year it treats roughly 9,900 people as inpatients and a good 10,000 as outpatients. The fact that the outpatient figure is the higher of the two shows up directly in our bookings, because most passengers want to go home the same day, and a lot of them ask for the return journey at the moment they book the first one.

The AMEOS Klinikum next door started in 2000 as an outpost of the AMEOS hospital in Heiligenhafen and has been in a new building on the hospital grounds since April 2017. It carries a large part of the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic Pflichtversorgung for the whole Kreis Plön, meaning the legal duty to admit and treat anyone in the district who needs that care, and it has 53 full inpatient places and 18 day places for the purpose. Alongside those it runs an Institutsambulanz, a hospital based outpatient clinic for people with long term conditions, and a Tagesklinik whose focus is the treatment of older patients. It works closely with the Klinik Preetz and with the psychiatric day clinic run by the Brücke SH. Teilstationär, the German word for how a day clinic works, means somebody arrives in the morning and goes home in the afternoon, often on every working day for several weeks. Because both houses serve the entire district, patients come from a long way off, and some of them from exactly the direction we come from.

For us, every one of these journeys begins outside the Kreis Plön, because Neumünster is kreisfrei, an urban district that belongs to no Kreis at all. That single administrative fact is the reason we are allowed to tell you the sum in advance, and it is explained in the section below. If a German health insurer is covering the journey, that fixed price does not apply: we need the doctor's written Verordnung, the authorisation, before we set off, and we bill the insurer directly. Without one you pay yourself, and then it is all the more useful to see the amount before you book. Visitors insured outside Germany pay us in the car in the ordinary way and get a printed receipt with the date, the route and the vehicle on it, which is what a foreign insurer will ask for.

Please tell us at the same time whether the driver should wait. For a blood test or a short check at the outpatient clinic waiting is usually the sensible choice, and it saves you standing outside afterwards. For a procedure with an open ended finish it is better to call us back when you are ready, and we simply drive out a second time. Anyone accompanying a patient to the Zentrale Notaufnahme or to the Kreißsaal, the delivery room, rings when the moment comes rather than to a plan, and that is what our office is there for. Somebody answers the phone at three in the morning as well.

Evenings, Sundays and shift work on the way out of Preetz

Inside Preetz there are three town bus routes, the 341, the 342 and the 343. They link the outlying residential quarters with the station and the town centre and are run by the Verkehrsbetriebe Kreis Plön, the district transport company. Service begins around six in the morning from Monday to Friday and ends between six and seven in the evening. On Saturdays the buses run in the morning only, and that is the whole of it. So if you want to get from the Klosterhof back to the Ostland-Siedlung, to Kahlbrook or out to the Wundersche Koppel at half past seven on a weekday evening, you walk. The town itself writes that extending the operating hours further into the evening is still on the wish list rather than in the timetable. That too is a snapshot, so check the times before you travel.

For the villages around Preetz there has been a service called ALFA since 31 January 2022, short for Anruf-Linien-Fahrten, which translates roughly as dial a route journeys. It fills in where no scheduled bus runs any more in the evening and at weekends, and it is operated with a taxi rather than a bus. There are six fixed routes, numbered in the two hundreds, three hundreds and four hundreds, going out among other places to Kühren and Wahlstorf, to Schellhorn, Scharstorf and Sophienhof, to Pohnsdorf, Postfeld, Barmissen and Kirchbarkau, and to Löptin, Nettelsee and Warnau. Two things are worth knowing. The journey has to be ordered by telephone at least one hour before the scheduled departure, and it runs only from bus stop to bus stop along those routes. Not one of them goes to Neumünster.

On the railway Preetz is better off than it feels. Trains to Kiel and to Lübeck run at close to half hourly intervals through the day. It is just that none of them goes to Neumünster. If you are thinking of leaving your car at the station, it is worth knowing that the car park next to the building does not belong to the town. The Bahnhof was sold to a private owner in 2013 and the ground beside it went with it. The travel centre and the waiting room inside the building are operated by Nordbahn, one of the regional train companies, while the public toilet and the bicycle parking are still provided by the town.

At night the people who call us are mostly on shift work. Shifts change at the Klinik Preetz on all 365 days of the year, the same is true in the nursing homes, and the businesses on the estate along the bypass do not all work between nine and five either. Add the relatives who need to get to the emergency department, and the guests who have stayed out at the Schusterfest, the town festival in May, or at the Capitol on the Kirchenstraße. On a few weekends the town is fuller than usual: on the third Saturday in August, when the craft market takes over the Markt, and in September for the Schusterlauf, the ten mile road race around the Lanker See that has been held since 1984. The town buses do not run any later on those days than on any other. The same answer covers all of it. We are reachable around the clock, on Sundays as on working days, and we collect you from where you actually are, not from the nearest bus stop.

A fixed price instead of the Taxameter

Preetz is the largest town in the Kreis Plön, which puts it well outside the Pflichtfahrgebiet of Neumünster. The Pflichtfahrgebiet is the area a licensed German taxi is obliged to serve and inside which the fare is not ours to set: within our own city boundary, which means before the car has even reached the Tasdorfer Weg, we may agree nothing at all, and the calibrated Taxameter, the official meter, works the fare out at the rate laid down by the authorities. A journey to Preetz is the opposite case. Precisely because it leaves the Pflichtfahrgebiet, we are allowed to fix the price in advance, and that is what we do.

What the run to Preetz costs is on the screen before you confirm the booking. Getting the car to you and putting your luggage in it are included in that figure, and the figure does not move afterwards, not if the L 49 backs up before Kirchbarkau and not if roadworks send the driver round the outside of the town. Whether you pay cash at the Klosterhof, take the card reader in the car, or settle the fare online beforehand by PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay makes no difference to the amount either. And as long as no car has yet set off towards Kirchbarkau, you can cancel free of charge.

If you are travelling in the other direction, out of Preetz and back to Neumünster, the same rule applies in reverse and the price is fixed in the same way. It is worth booking that leg at the moment you book the first one, because a free car standing on the Bahnhofstraße in the evening is not something to count on.

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