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?
Tram should be allowed to ram them.
I think this is more fuck shitty drivers/parkers, than it is fuck cars. You can have a car, and not park like an asshole. Shit like this, needs to be ticketed HARD. Like “If you block the tram/bus lane, you WILL be fined FROM(not upto) £1000 per minute that the tram/bus is delayed.”. If people cant park properly on their own, fuck um. Make them do it in the way they will feel. If you want to get the rich assholes, gauge the fine by post code. The better the post code, the higher the starting point of the fine.
No mercy. Call police, get them towed and fined. And tow them to the most remote impound lot possible.
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.
You’re bi and that’s totaly okay! I also like my car and enjoy decent public transportation and walkable cities.
New bi pride just dropped
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.
As a car enjoyer the world would be a significantly better place if the people who didn’t want to drive cars didn’t have to. Most of my frustrations driving are caused by too many people on the roads and people that clearly could give less of a shit about driving a vehicle but have no other option. All my friends in the car community are in agreement on that
I don’t know about your city, but getting towed away can cost you between 150 and 500 (diffent in every city) plus the fine (parking on a tram lane) 120 plus about 25 for every night your car is not picked up. So people avoid that.
When I just got my drivers license I came home one night and found a free parking spot, felt like the last one. When I needed my car about a week later it was gone. Went to the police to report it as stolen, turned out it was towed. I accidentally parked on a reseved spot that you are not allowed to park in. Pretty dumb but it was an honest mistake. The fine was about twice what I earned a month from my partime job as a student. It really sucked, but it was a good lesson.
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
Perhaps they shouldn’t be operating dangerous machinery if they’re not fully involved in what they’re doing.
Perfect world vs Real world
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 100mm 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?
First I wrote an area, but then remembered it was diameter but forgot to take out the ²
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™.
Pretty sure a pedestrian-stepping-in-front-of-a-normal-tram’s day isn’t going to be any better.
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
