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?
I’d say the road isn’t wide enough. While the vehicle is parked away from the curb, it’s not egregious, and shouldn’t be in the way of a tram line if the road was planned properly. The fact there isn’t enough room for the tram to pass means there isn’t really enough room between parked vehicles and the drive lanes in the first place.
That picture screams to me that the tram line was added after the fact without proper planning and road management.
The car was parked poorly. The parking spots can even accommodate construction vans. Here’s an angle where you can see it a bit better.
The car is parked almost half a meter away from the curb (at least at the back wheel).
I do agree that it’s a planning issue though. There is no reason that this street needs free parking spots and if they REALLY need to be there, there should be a better indication if your car is sticking out too much.
replace car parking areas with bicycle parking areas
That’s a horrible parking job. They practically need to take a tram to get to the curb.
It would be so simple to paint a line on the road! I don’t see one. Get out of the car, look down, re-park if necessary. And it would make ticketing easier too. Ticket if any part of the car touches or goes into the line, looking straight down. And if the other edge of the line is the max of the tram, you have the width of the line-paint as your buffer zone.
They’re trying to do that right now with blue dots but for some reason this is not road legal and needs to go through some unnecessary paperwork before it can be approved
Whaddya mean dots? Raised bumpies? I still think a solid painted line would do the job and there’d be no room for argument about whether the vehicle was in violation. I’m all for raised dots along the line, so you’d feel if your tires were over it, help you position. But you also want the fenders and mirrors inside the lines.
in Strasbourg the cobblestones pattern is showing the tram space
yeah, why would they keep those parking spots here
Usually because otherwise there wouldn’t be much space left for parking at all.
In some places, these trams are gonna run through every major route, leaving no room for parking on smaller streets, and barely any parking that isn’t next to tram rails on larger streets.
If you want to have both trams and cars, then depending on the city, you might have no choice but to put parking spots there given the size of the inner-city roads.
Or they added parking spaces on a street that wasn’t built to handle parking.
It’s possible, but knowing modern city management, it’s very likely the tram was the newest addition as people requested public transit alternatives and the city failed to properly plan it out.
There’s not enough room with the way the road is setup for parking, traffic, and the tram. It doesn’t really matter which was there first. Either the roadway needs to be widened to accommodate all of them, or the street parking should be removed. Especially if parked vehicles are regularly getting in the way.
One car in the way is a fluke, an asshole driver, but cars being in the way regularly means the design is fucked.
Knowing modern city management, adding parking spaces is always more likely than adding public transit. I’m sure they already had a tram network but local shops wanted some street-side parking to increase business, so they just crammed it in there.
It was the opposite in my city. Street parking has always been there, but the light rail was retrofitted into the tiny streets all over downtown in the last 5 years.
Yeah I’ve never seen them increase public transport in my entire life. I guess it depends on the city/country.
Either way, they shouldn’t widen the streets. They should just get rid of the parking.