This does unfortunately happen multiple times per day. Sometimes it’s smaller incidents where the tram driver can get out and collapse the car’s mirror. Other times the owner of the car comes out of a nearby house after the tram used its bell extensively (like today) and moves the car. And then there are times when police needs to get involved to tow the car which often takes upwards of 1 hour.
The truly infuriating part is that if the tram damages a poorly parked car, the transportation company will have to pay the damages. Poorly parked vehicles never get fined and the owners will only need to pay if the car ends up getting towed.
Why do we accept that drivers sabotage a city’s public transport infrastructure like this?
As a car guy (yes I know where I am - I don’t live in a city though), idiots like this make no sense to me.
If you enjoy driving, you should in fact be in favor of public transit. It means less traffic, makes driving nicer. Even if you’re 100% self-absorbed, you should still be supportive of public transit.
Welcome to the war on cars, car guy.
But legit this take makes so much sense. The whole point of the war on cars is that we all have options that meet our needs. People who need to take cars, due to distance or disability can, because the roads are clearer with others taking transit, walking or biking. Multi-modal transit benefits car people as much as it does everyone else.
IMO, as a driver, tow them. There should be a city ordnance in place that as soon as a tram needs to stop because of a poorly parked vehicle, they call for a tow immediately. If you get back to your car before the tow truck shows up, you can avoid being towed by simply getting the fuck out of the way. If not, good luck idiot.
There should be zero tolerance for this kind of fuckary.
In Amsterdam they just drive on and push the car off the tracks lmao.
Whoa and that in Germany where people are pretty law-abiding.
Yes but they simply don’t know how to park. My apartment used to oversee a parking lot and a relatively narrow two-way road with cars parked either side and I’ve seen everything 😂
Even professional drivers with trucks etc that you’d think would know the dimensions of their vehicle… It was so fun to watch them struggle when a car would come from the other direction and when there was heaps of space for both to pass, or watching them trying to maneuver into an amply spaced parking spot lol
I can tell you these people wouldn’t last a day in southern Europe or south east Asia where you need to be precise 😂😂
No. Germany is the car nation of Europe.
Not when it comes to cars
The city of St. Gallen in Switzerland simply charges CHF 20 per minute that the tram is blocked. (21€ / $25) https://www.srf.ch/news/zug-blockiert-falschparken-kostet-20-franken-pro-minute
Still seems somewhat low but maybe a good start. Looks like the longest delay here in Bremen has been 2 ½ hours which would only be around 3000 CHF if they applied that here. Yes that’s a lot for a parking violation but it doesn’t make up for diversions, overtime and the delay caused to the hundreds of passengers.
3000 CHF can financially ruin someone who’s not doing very well. I’d say it’s enough of a fine.
Perhaps doing it the Finnish way would be better of course, make it depend on your income or net worth or something.
That’s a whole lot of money. A single infraction should not financially ruin a person. There is no good way out.
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Why not? You’d better not commit the infraction then. You are actively damaging all of the tram passengers.
People do have bad days where they’re not fully involved in what they’re doing.
A small pinch might work better to rectify that behaviour than a noose around their neck
Because there is no opportunity for betterment. You don’t deserve to lose your life for that.
You can reimburse 3000 CHF in two months of work.
You asked for the punishment to be substantially larger. Also if you are poor this may sink you. Not everybody has 1.5 grand each month to spend on extra stuff.
Yes, the infrastructure should be better in the first place, i.e. do not have parking spots there. But I guess the whole reason these parking spots are there is because people would just park there regardless if there are parking spots or not and if there weren’t parking spots and people still parked illegally, they should absolutely cover the damages they caused. Keep in mind, that 2 ½ hours was the longest recent delay which caused whole chunks of the city center to be inaccessible.
One of the biggest issue with cars is that as a society we are subsidizing their external costs way too much. Owning a car entails a lot of responsibility and yet most people operate it with very little regard for their surroundings.
Eh so these are official parking spots? That’s a bit weird yeah.
The problem is that cars are revered in this country as if they were sacred objects. Data protection violations: dududu! Violations of fundamental rights: depending on your wallet… But cars are always sacred. They have the halo of insurance and investment fraud, even if they are parked on tram tracks or in the fire department access lane to a hospital.
It’s because your country makes so many cars. Same in the US. Cars are holy because so much money is made off them.
Where I’m from in Holland they are sacred also but it’s kinda a different reason, car ownership was a big symbol of economic progress in the 60s and people have become addicted to them.
Slap a cow catcher on the front of those trams and blast those mfers out of the way. Park on the tracks at your own risk assholes.
The fact that the drivers aren’t fined is what’s most wild to me. Where I live they fine the everliving fuck out of you if you park somewhere you’re not supposed to.
This right here is the answer. These car drivers need absolutely punishing fines if they get in the way of the tram.
People keep doing it because they get away with it.
Put a cow-catcher on the front, like the old-timey trains, and roll those cars out of the way. Make sure that it gets covered heavily in the media, with cars left on their sides and roofs.
The scofflaws will get the message really quick, and stop it.
This is the way. Its like how fireman handle someone parking in front of a hydrant. They go through the car with fire axes. The persons doing it deserve it.
Here in Europe it’s very hard to see hydrants though. There are no signs and they’re just little panel-covered holes.
There are signs in Germany, but most people can’t really read them.
4.5m to the right 3.5m in front of the sign is a hydrant. And the line is 100mm² in diameter
I am so incredibly confused by that last sentence. I get the box dimensions just fine but
Line, 100mm²… Which is area, and diameter?
Yeah I wondered about how things were there.
Can’t spell Tram without Ram.
While I wholeheartedly agree with you, the first pedestrian to step in front of one of those things is going to have a very bad day™.
Fun fact, old interurban cars in the states had a mechanism on the front that looked like a bed frame that would scoop up any pedestrians on the road and prevent the car from running over them. Some even placed this under the tram but before the drive train so they could still be coupled together as needed but still not kill innattentive pedestrians
This video kinda shows a few designs but I’m not immediately finding the under train ones I’ve seen on cars at the Illinois Railway Museum. I learned from a volunteer at the Orange Empire Railway Museum that they were more commonly actually used for scooping passed out drunks off the right of way
I was gonna say: the tram needs a ram.
Trams should operate on fire truck rules.
You don’t need a fine, per se, you just get billed for the repairs after it rams your vehicle out of the way.
How can they install a track and not bother to paint a parking line on the road.
The amount of drives I’ve seen who are completely incapable of parking within generously sized painted parking spaces is genuinely concerning. You can even see in the above photo that it’s parked over a foot away from the curb so the driver really parked like shit and some lines on the road probably wouldn’t make any difference
We’ll have to figure out why the train driver is made responsible instead of the parked car drivers.
The fact is, most people shouldn’t be driving. That’s not an individual criticism its an objective condition.
Which is why we need trains and hi quality public transit!
It’s also better really.
I used to live in a place where I needed a car to go anywhere because the buses were so unreliable, infrequent and useless (all going through the town centre with lots of delays). I hated it, because everyone drove and was stuck in traffic. Driving is very stressful too.
And now I live in a big city, have really dense public transport for 20 bucks a month flat. No more finding and paying for parking spaces. Being able to go back from a different place than I arrived. No more parking meters timing out. No more maintenance. No more fuel costs. No more insurance. No more traffic fines. No more yearly inspections. No more people damaging my ride with shopping carts. I love it honestly. And to top it all off I can ride while playing with my phone and not having to pay any attention to the road. No need to be sober either for that matter.
Quality quickly drops off leaving the city unfortunately but that’s the thing with cities, you rarely need to leave them anyway.
In Vienna, over the last decade the authorities have removed hundreds of parking spots like this where cars repeatedly blocked the tram. Now, the number of times it happens is very low, since the spots that remain should be very easy to Park in a way that doesnt block
According to my social media feed from yesterday everyone in Vienna has to park like this
“Wild car spotted drinking water from a canal”
~ source National Geographic
Riders should get out and kick in the windows, imo.
But seriously the city created this problem by not bumping out the curb to the area that shouldn’t be parked in.
If you want to take things into your own hands: paint a no parking area on the ground there (diagonal lines in a box) and steal a no parking sign from elsewhere and plant it there if there’s not already one so cops will ticket these people.
And keep a tow truck on call until the rules stick.
Gotta fine that shit, that is unacceptable, wtf. Weak af.
sabotage
the correct term here. If they don’t understand parking, they should not have a driving license. If they do, it’s intentional.
When losing a driver’s license means losing a job and access to groceries, the standards have to be lowered. Even as low as they are, people with suspended licenses still mostly drive, because our infrastructure requires it to live. Better public transit is the only path to giving bad drivers a way to participate in society without having to drive.
if the tram damages a poorly parked car, the transportation company will have to pay the damages. Poorly parked vehicles never get fined and the owners will only need to pay if the car ends up getting towed.
THAT is exactly the problem.
The politicians made sure the Law was set-up to benefit car owners and screw the rest, similarly to how drivers will get a mere fine when they kill somebody with their car whilst distracted (say, looking at their mobile phones) in situations which if they didn’t do it behind the wheel of a car would be treated as involuntary homicide (what Americans call manslaughter) and carry a jail sentence, because they didn’t have due care and attention whilst controlling a dangerous piece of machinery.
I once heard (not really sure if it’s true, but damn I would love if it was) about how in Switzerland they had this car tow which was simply a big grab claw - similar to those in junkyards - that just grabbed irregularly park cars from above to put it in the tow truck and, well, any damage to the vehicle was the responsability of the car owner for having parked the car like that
Have something like that and this problem you’re describing (in, judging by the picture, Bremen in Germany) would solve itself within a month as news travelled of car owners doing this shit and getting their car trashed. Then again, German mainstream politicians absolutelly are in the pockets of the car industry (all it takes is to look at how the handling of the Emissions Scandal was basically “blame some random Engineer”, or check which companies get the most subsidies in Germany), so don’t expect pro-people legilstation if it goes against the interests of the car lobby.
what Americans call manslaughter
Yes and no. We use homicide too, but homicide just means one person was killed by another person. That’s used more in medical situations or law enforcement reports. Manslaughter is a legal term and comes in when the state/courts are doing the whole charging part. Then there’s the whole manslaughter vs murder that trips people up too since those are both legal terms. I believe the main difference between them is intent.
That’s the impression I had.
My impression having lived in a couple of places in Europe (including Britain) is that legally speaking what the American Legal System understands as “Manslaughter” is in European legal systems called “Involuntary Killing”, “Involuntary Homicide” or even “Involuntary Murder” (this latter is is confusing when talking to Americans because, if I undestand it correctly, in the American Legal System “Murder” cannot be involuntary as it explicitly means a purposeful killing) or the equivalent in the local language.
Anyways, my point is that people who kill other people not on purpose but as a result of being careless when they are in control of something which can easilly kill if not handled with due care and attention, if they do it whilst driving seldom if ever get charged with a charge of killing somebody due to not being as carefull as they are legally mandated to be, but instead usually just get traffic violating charge which is usually just a fine.
If you kill a person in germany by car, because you neglected your lawful duties (Sorgfaltspflichten) it is usually a case of §222 penal code (StGB fahrlässige Tötung/ negligent homicide), you’ll get a penalty ranging from “Geldstrafe” (fine) up to five years, e. g. based on your neglect as with most other cases. In very specific cases (DUI, etc) the penalty for drivers is up to five years for endangerment alone! Implying a german bonus for manslaughter by car seems - ceterus paribus - not true.
But how often does it actually happen in practice?
What I’ve seen in other countries in Europe where indeed people can theoretically be charged like that, is that even in extreme cases (for example, a guy in Portugal which in the middle of Lisbon run over and killed a pedestrian on a zebra crossing when the traffic sign was red for driver, because he was looking at his mobile phone) they almost never get anything but a fine (this specific guy got away with a €125 fine).
In practice - for example some years ago in England - I’ve seen harder prosecutions against cyclists than I’ve seen against car drivers.
This scenario - in germany - would be 200 Euro for the citation (“Bußgeld”), just for using the phone while driving. The combined charges for negligent homicide should be much higher.
Which is about the price you would pay for overspeeding in the rest of Europe. In Germany it’s 20e, basically a parking fine. And that’s not accounting for local cost of life.
Traffic laws in Germany are a fucking joke
