Robert Friedrich Ehlert Otzen (9 May 1872 in Giesensdorf - 3 October 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, Otzen felt that only an entire network of such roads would attract the political support needed for such a project to be built.[2]
This article has been translated in part from the German Wikipedia equivalent.