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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?
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