Did emergency van noise become louder and more frequent recently?

It's partly about the acoustic reflection too. Those newer sirens bounce off the glass and concrete facades they're putting up everywhere, especially in Mitte and along the new developments near Warschauer. I live near Rosenthaler Platz and the sound bounces between the new buildings in a way it never did with the older, shorter DDR-era blocks. Also, the Berlin fire department has been consolidating stations, so the remaining ones cover wider areas with fewer vehicles running more callouts, which means you hear the same siren patterns more often from the same routes.

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yeah its def not just you. i live near hermannplatz and swear the martin horns feel like theyre right in my apartment sometimes. one thing nobody mentions is the new electric vehicles theyre using too - the silent electric engines mean they rely almost entirely on the siren to announce themselves, whereas old diesel vans had that rumble youd hear coming from blocks away. so now you just get the full siren blast out of nowhere instead of that gradual build. also noticed the fire department on kottbusser damm seems to run drills way more often than they used to, like 3-4 times a week in the afternoon.

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You're not imagining it. Berlin switched a lot of their emergency vehicles to new sirens a couple years back, the Martin Horn system, and they have a much sharper, more piercing tone than the old ones. On top of that, the city's traffic has gotten worse, so they're running with lights and sirens more often just to get through the same intersections, especially on main roads like Frankfurter Allee or the ring. The drivers also tend to keep the horn blasts going longer now because people in cars are glued to their phones and don't pull over.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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