Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
Two things: this is an accepted practice all over the country and the traffic code has its own traffic sign for it when it is permitted. And the suggested amendment would only make it legal in situations where there would remain 1.6m of space for pedestrians, wheelchair users, and strollers. So the car parked in the image would remain illegally parked.
Munich has made a mistake of tacitly allowing this parking practice in areas where there isn't enough space, motivated by keeping roads accessible to first responders, which is not nothing. They have clearly made a mistake if everybody still owns a car when there s above average public transport. And people will still park like assholes. Under these plans (they haven't been approved yet according to the article), the assholes could be punished though. It would just not give fines out to everybody. This is a compromise solution in a bad situation.
I would amend the plans in two areas: the grumpy people of Munich should be allowed to smear dogshit legally on every car that doesn't leave 1.6m of space on the sidewalk (the article mentions a similar occurrence). And giving up car ownership should be rewarded with free public transport for a suitable amount of time.
Once you tacitly allow this everywhere with your "yes, but allow 1.6m" rule, you've just actually allowed it everywhere with no qualifiers. No one is going to get a tape measure out and verify when they park. When its utterly common, I doubt police or enforcement officers will check either except very sporadically, allowing it to happen 99% of the time.
A "yes insane thing, but only when sane" law is always, always a give away to the insane thing.
Germans love a rule, love pea counting, and they will measure.
Your insane argument doesn't quite work for me when the mutual benefit of the practice was to provide ample space for fire trucks and ambulances on the roads. This is not a matter of the city just not giving a shit. They weighed their options.
Another aspect that wasn't touched upon in the article will also play into this: parking fines are a great way to get money into the city coffers. So it will probably pay off to get members of the Ordnungsamt - or the office of public order - who handle these things out in force armed with a tape measure and a camera and chi-ching for Munich's revenue.
This view weighs comfort of pedestrians against space for emergency vehicles and just takes it as granted that cars will and thus must be allowed to park there. It only asks "who do we discomfort with these cars" and not "can we stop discomforting people with all these cars".
How about: no parking where there isn't enough room for emergency vehicles left and leave the sidewalk to the fucking pedestrians that deserve not just a 1,5m tunnel of steel and concrete but a sidewalk that is comfortable to use.
Car owners shouldn't be allowed to discomfort every pedestrian just because of their comfort of parking right in front of their house.
In principle, I agree with you. And do you know why hardly any city government can put this rigorous approach into practice? Because they will be voted out in the next election. Because car ownership is still high. Realpolitik applies here.
You clearly don't know Germans. Yes they will. They already do. You're not allowed to park within 5m of an intersection, which the people in charge of checking and giving tickets will absolutely measure. There are many other instances where distances are involved like this. They already carry a tape measure (or equivalent) for this exact reason. Adding one more case just fits the theme.