Named after the nearby Karlshorst racecourse: ‘Traber’ means trotter.
The path is named after the nearby Trabrennbahn Karlshorst (trotting track); before that it was Prinz-Friedrich-Wilhelm-Straße, after a Prussian prince. The racecourse opened in 1894 for steeplechases and was rebuilt as a trotting track after 1945; in the GDR it was the only one.