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Pretty much every day someone parks their car on the tram tracks and blocks our city's tram network from operating
(feddit.org)
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?
This is mainly an enforcement problem. If the city simply towed every car that did this, this sort of shit would stop immediately. But of course nobody wants to hurt the precious little feefees of car drivers because they're very very special little snowflakes.
It's a situation where they're underplaying the role of a tram, while further glorifying cars. If a car parked in the middle of a car going road there would be outrage and hefty fines. While in this case, it is relatively lightly brushed off.
Yep! Here in Germany many of the big political parties are bought by the car industry and car centric thinking is very widespread. Any measures to limit these issues like cutting free parking spots will cause a big uproar.
If you buy a car, do not buy German. I certainly won’t.
They're not even that good anymore: see the build quality of the Mercedes EQS: https://youtu.be/XrwZgCLs-zs
Audi seems to have done similar. I have a Q6. It’s been in the shop more than my garage. Had to beg them to get an older q5 loaner cause they kept giving me Q6 loaners which has the same issues. Road noise, shitty charging, last week it just errored and told me to pull over. I had to exit the vehicle for 20 min while it “reset”.
Add that is a privacy nightmare in the USA… next car won’t be a German car made in the last decade.
Once, the label "made in China" was an indication of a poor product whilst "made in Germany" was regarded as the finest quality.
Today, Chinese cars are regarded as more reliable than their German counterparts.
The BMW can't even make turn signals work anymore.
Isn't this particular issue a city responsibility?
For starters most narrow streets here (Süd-Westen) where the trams go, are tram only or tram+pedestrians in a centre area. But very very rarely tram+cars or trams+bicycles.
The issue seems fining and law enforcement, but the actual error happens way earlier on: tram tracks should never run right next to street car parking spots (they can be next to parking spots but only if cars enter the spots from elsewhere and there is obstacle between tram tracks and car parking spots.
It's poor design.
And probably city responsibility because I can't imagine Bundesstraße to be designed like this in the first place, they always optimise for traffic flow and don't care for a few parking spots more or less, that's usually more a city admin concern.
It'd be even better for the tram to just push the car put of the way, and then hold the car owner responsible for any damage that results.
Agree. In plenty of big EU cities, the tram driver would just call a number, and the car gets towed in 15 minutes. We can’t expect everybody to obey the laws out of kindness to others. For some, enforcement in needed
15 minutes is a way too looooong time for this. A good network has a tram every 5-10 minutes, that's already a big tram Stau and a lot of missed connections for passengers. There just shouldn't be street side parking options right next to tram tracks.
I'm surprised there wouldn't be vulture tow truck drivers looking out for these cars and waiting to tow immediately.
There should be no cars allowed on the tram tracks apart from emergency vehicles, buses, and maybe taxis.
Agreed.
While I do think it sometimes just has to be a shared space, a historic or geographic bottleneck for some edge case of a few buildings being completely unreachable otherwise (also for contractors or movers for example). But then cars should be stopped from entering the section with traffic lights, tram passes, cars can pass again. Or on a whitelist basis where only a few residents can get a permit to use it. While for the streetside parking even the edge cases I can't make up
Encouraging more law enforcement on Lemmy? Never thought I'd see the day.
You're confused because your thinking stops at "law enforcement always bad" and goes no further whilst most people here are 2 or 3 levels above that, thinking "how do we use the tools we have to make things better for most people".
You're mentally operating at a simplistic superficial level of "thing X good, thing Y bad" like a child, which is of course insuficient to understand the logical conclusions of those operating at the level of Principles ("what should be done which is best for the greatest number").
Mind you, populists just looove people who think like you do because they're so easy to give the run-around.
Completely unnecessary ad hominem, which happens to be completely incorrect because you lept to conclusions about me based on a tiny joke comment.
Go fuck yourself.