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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 the problem is that widespread, couldn't you hire someone to patrol this track all day with a tow truck and promptly tow away any offenders, financing the operation with the fines that are incurred?
I think the issue is that you can only bill the drivers for the towing plus any costs caused by it. The towing company will not get paid extra for patrolling the area and the 1 hour delay is usually caused by the police that needs to arrive and make the decision to have the car towed.
Yeah that's the issue, right? No way to enforce it.
The city needs to implement fines for this behavior. If the behavior doesn't stop, then have a contract with some local towing agency that gives them a larger fine (say, double) for a 5 minute response time (passed on in full to the person being towed), plus a retainer paid for with the fines.
The city could solve this if they wanted to.
There are a lot of legal challenges to solve for this kind of stuff, as far as I know they’re trying to do two things right now:
And yes they should definitely introduce fines that go far beyond the ridiculously low fines for regular parking offenses in Germany which are like 15€.
Is there any reason the transportation company couldn't just move the car out of the way? Any legal blocker to just solving the issue without having to issue fines etc?
I don’t know about the specifics but a friend who is a tram driver said that they always need to call the police first. This might be a legal thing or just company policy
Yeah, probably a liability thing. Seems dumb, trams shouldn't be second class citizens.
I'm surprised it's not possible for the tram company to sue them for the full costs of the delay: that being a tram line hence the trams not being able to pass a stuck tram, this would add up to just about all the losses of all trams stuck due to this.
Something based on the average ticket price per-passenger, the average number of passengers taken in during such a time period in those lines were the trains were stuck and the length of time period of the stoppage, would add up to way more that €15.