Parken Überall — The Very German Culture War No One Likes To Talk About
By: Bernie Duffy
Tags: Environmental Issues, Cycling, Parking, Hamburg, Pedestrians

Parken Überall — The Very German Culture War No One Likes To Talk About Bernie Duffy Just now·12 min read

After receiving threats of violence for reporting illegally parked cars, the author examines what drives German car culture to near-fanatical levels.

My neighbourhood in Hamburg has reached the absolute limit with parking. Sidewalks, street corners, and even the emergency fire exits around the local hospital and school are packed bumper to bumper, with barely space for pedestrians to squeeze through sideways to cross the street. About three years ago, on my street, the wooden bollards preventing cars from driving on the pavement were torn out by perpetrators unknown and a parade of SUVs and vans began using the full width of the foot-and-bike path in order to double-park on the inside of street-parked cars. After witnessing a couple of near-tragic incidents, I realized it was no longer safe to allow my 10-year-old daughter to use that way to school.… This was the last straw. Something had to be done.

In January 2020, I downloaded a phone app for reporting illegally parked cars, Wegeheld (“Path Hero”), and began snapping away at the worst offenders and submitting complaints to the office of traffic fines. Nothing happened, there was no visible change to parking behavior on my street, and so discouraged after several weeks, I stopped. Some months later, however, in November 2020, there was a bang on my front door. A masked man stood, brandishing copies of the complaints I had submitted and asked if I was the one who had made them. When I replied in the affirmative, he very aggressively warned me against making any more complaints, or bad things would happen to me and my family.

This took me sideways, and I was understandably freaked out. I reported the matter to the police, of course, but they took little interest. When I insisted that the person who threatened me had copies of the complaints that I made to the office of traffic fines, the response from the police was that such a thing was impossible, because city offices may not give out personal details….

And yet… that is what had seemingly occurred.

The intimidation continued in the following weeks with menacing and mocking phone calls containing name-calling, cryptic text messages and finding the same man once standing outside my kitchen window, staring in. I rallied friends and neighbours around me to keep an eye out and take photos of any suspicious activity. I ramped up home security and went back to escorting my daughter to and from school each day. Eventually, after conducting my own investigations, gathering solid evidence and haranguing the police into action, the culprit was identified, taken in for questioning by the criminal police, and the harassment abruptly stopped.

I was never given further explanation by the police, although I attempted to learn the outcome of the case. They handed me an A4 print-out of an info sheet along the lines of “So, you are the victim of harassment”, and showed me the door. I began legal proceedings against the traffic fines office for mishandling my personal details and putting my family in danger. A solid wall of city lawyers stood before me and my case did not progress very far. In the meantime, I was barred from making any further complaints about traffic, and was subtly warned by the department against making complaints ever again if I did not wish to be threatened. I was left disheartened and disillusioned by my experience, looking out of my windows to see the daily parade of SUVs and vans continuing to drive along the full extent of the footpath as if it were the new traffic lane of the street. Among them, I noticed the man who had threatened me. In a round-about way, I suppose he had at least achieved his goals to silence me with impunity and continue with his antisocial parking behavior.

In the months that followed, I had various conversations with friends, neighbours and colleagues about these events and encountered an array of surprising and often emotional responses. I came to the slow realization that I had quite blindly, and inadvertently, stumbled into the front line of Germany’s very own and very real Culture War. While America wrestles over transgender toilets, Antifa and far-right idealogy, issues that will have most civilized Germans rolling their eyes, bring up parking and that same German will be frothing at the mouth in seconds. The struggle for public space, and who gets to use it, is the biggest, most divisive issue of today, bar none.

Germany is one of the most densely populated states in Europe, and in the central areas of the larger cities, particularly, there is a dearth of places to park cars. Most old apartment buildings do not contain underground parking, and dwellers of five- and six-story apartment blocks, in most cases, all share on-street public parking. Couple this with the relative prosperity of the country, where car prices and insurances are cheap, and parking fees low or unheard of, it is not uncommon for households to have two vehicles, and/or including a camper van. That is in the middle of a city, without private parking, and despite the extensive public transport options available.

Germans are car crazy, this is well established, but the level to which government and policy panders to the car-owner is absurd in comparison to neighbouring EU states. Parking fines are as low as €10 or €15 and cars rarely ticketed, speeding in residential areas is for the most part tolerated with speed limit signs regarded as “recommendations” to be ignored, and authorities do as little as possible to enforce regulations on vehicles, displaying a clearly car-friendly bias. One car on our street, illegally abandoned without plates or a tax disk since 2007 (I checked Google Street View history) was only removed in 2019 after a tree grew out of its bonnet. I have seen homeless people moved on from the same street within 20 minutes.

The car is Germany’s Sacred Cow, a symbol of its national identity, the reason, some would argue, for the country’s continued existence. To critique the car is un-German, in the same way that being communist is un-American. I have had people I thought as wholly rational become instantly infuriated with me when they discovered that I was reporting illegally parked vehicles. What business was it of mine? I try to be calm and non-judgmental when I get such a response, and to treat their sentiment analytically. But the nerve it touches in people is… immense.

Two years ago, a neighbouring district began a pilot programme to introduce two pedestrian streets to a crowded and highly polluted corner of the city. Hamburg, a city of nearly two and a half million people, has no integrated pedestrian network, and only three or four “dedicated” pedestrian streets which are only such in name, with delivery and construction vehicles endlessly pushing through foot traffic. This new pilot programme, “Ottensen Macht Platz”, was established to showcase how a neighbourhood could be improved when people and bikes are given priority over car traffic and parking. The scheme was to last six months, however it did not install permanent barriers, only traffic cones, which drivers frequently kicked out of the way in order to defiantly use the street and force pedestrians back onto the pavements.

Ottensen Macht Platz, the doomed pedestrianization trials which was to ruin it for us all in perpetuity.

The scheme, while noble in its intention, was cut short by several weeks after a bitter battle in the courts led by a car-driver lobby. While the scheme was given another five days by the court decision, car drivers immediately descended on the area on news of their win. I was there to witness the stream of SUVs as they swept away the barriers and rushed into the district to fill every available parking space, victoriously blasting their horns and ecstatically cheering out of their car windows as they paraded through.

It was one of the saddest, and most pathetic, sights I have ever seen in my life.

If this is how we prioritize our shared existence, we are indeed doomed as a species.

The disappointments for the pilot scheme did not end there as the experiment was branded “too ambitious”, never to be repeated, and new “more democratic” decisions were to be made for the future use of public space in the district. The campaign which was formerly for an “autofreies” (auto-free) district was now rebranded as “auto-armes” (auto-reduced). In other words, the message was thoroughly hammered home that cars belonged in the city and on every street no matter what, and that this is the fair outcome for all. (The discussion, I should point out, is never about how fair to everyone the autobahns are and how much pedestrian or biking space they accommodate!)

The failures of the organizers, being the Green party and residents, were painfully apparent as they could have been more resolute in their handling of the scheme. The pushback to all their efforts, however, was indeed very great. Much like the bollards being ripped out of the footpath next to my home, these are battles that are being fought street by street, and the car side of the fight is unwilling to yield an inch while claiming whatever it can.

The driver’s interests have a huge amount of support taking up the rear. The most audible of supporters for car-primacy is the local tabloid press, which ran leader stories railing against the Ottensen pedestrian pilot scheme every day, whinge-force-10, for its entire duration, as if sacrificing two streets for pedestrians was against all reason itself. This is the same press, mind, which goes into daily conniptions over e-scooters and bike lanes, while roundly failing to shine any critical light on the death, destruction, air and noise pollution wreaked by cars. ADAC, the German automobile club, is the next most prominent pro-car voice. With over 21 million members, it is by far the largest lobby group in Germany. Think of it like the NRA, Big Oil and all the car manufacturers in the U.S. rolled into one supercharged monster. It is an unstoppable force persistently agitating in every court in the land in the interest of drivers rights and for more parking space, to the detriment of cyclists, pedestrians, and all other life on Earth, frankly.

The biggest factor in the pro-car outlook, however, is the inherent cultural perspective of the car’s place in society. Cars are ingrained into young German’s skulls from the moment they can hold a dinky toy and go vroom-vroom. All the new talk of turning energy green, thinking of the environment and future generations, makes plenty of sense to reasonable Germans, but that sense seems to evaporate in the face of vroom-vroom, which is the only thing most grown-up Germans seem to want to do with their lives.

The pushback against any sort of green planning is growing exponentially and on every level of social engagement. A recent local plan to introduce resident parking fees of €50/year (ridiculously low by EU standards) is being fought tooth and nail. On a national scale, political parties are tapping into this emotive issue in a worrisome manner. Most bluntly, by the AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland). The far-right party hung-up its earlier anti-migrant rhetoric in order to represent itself as the champion of the poor downtrodden car-driver who is victim to green policy gone mad. The AfD, has been busy fighting every new pop-up bike lane with court injunctions since the pandemic began, and next plans to take their anti-bike agenda nationwide. After all, their logic goes, without bikes on the roads there will be more space to drive and park, right? Right?

With the topsy-turvy logic of today’s political theater, the AfD no doubt appeals to a large segment of the German population who are behind the wheel fuming at cyclists in front of them. Polling at 10% to 12%, they stand to make further gains in the upcoming elections on the road-rage-ticket alone. This is proving to be a popular stance — drivers feel victimized by change and inconvenience. It is the big unspoken issue which determines many voters’ choice of party. Most parties take a softer and more pragmatic tone than the AfD, but along more or less the same lines, careful to repeat often that the personal freedom of the car is supreme, and the industry vital for the country. Even the Greens will not shake the boat here, terrified of losing middle-ground voters. The German Greens will never raise a critical voice against the Sacred Cow, opting instead to focus on “making cycling more attractive” — which in real terms means widening existing bike lanes by a few centimeters.

Making bike lanes slightly wider, however, fails to impress most. To the drivers’ lobbies, it simply means more automatic court challenges to fight, and to environmentalists, it is a token gesture. To me, having witnessed my child stood frozen in the tracks of an SUV barreling in reverse along the footpath, it is sickeningly inadequate. With around 40% of the neighbourhood vote, surely the Greens have a mandate to make a meaningful change? Everything they do, however, is viciously resisted. Much like the “War on Woke” in America, all of the Green’s progress is under constant threat of being undone, and I fear they will lose ground in the upcoming elections due to not having taken a stronger and clearer position on pertinent issues. I still vote for them, because there are no good alternatives. I wag my finger, because I feel they need to grow teeth and stop compromising and being polite.

It is time to actively enforce speed limits and control parking! Removing redundant vehicles from the roads will create more parking for those who actually require it on a daily basis. Too many people are using the streets as a repository for their car collections… tax them and make them pay for new multi-story parking houses! If it needs to be spelled out, there it is. But this reduces the vroom potential, of course. And it all makes far too much sense for the unstoppable car lobby which automatically fights every restriction aimed at its members.

It was the Greens who eventually helped me with my personal predicament. I kept escalating the matter of the harassment I received to higher and higher levels of government. I was ignored by all until the Greens gave me a sympathetic ear. They promised to have the bollards on my street replaced. After two months, they were not. I reminded them again and escalated the promise they had made to me further, until finally, in May of this year, six months after having my life threatened, two bollards appeared, and finally stopped the flow of traffic along the footpath.

The new bollards, replaced after a year and a half of emails and formal complaints.

And so it is one battle chalked up against the illegal parkers and order is partially restored on this otherwise quiet corner of Hamburg. A shallow victory. Occasionally, I stop at the bollards and marvel at the sheer amount of emotional hassle and complex bureaucracy I had to endure just to get them replaced. Had I done nothing, the cars would still be using the footpath unimpeded. And so, it just had to be me to push the task. I would rather not — I am a busy man with much better things to be doing. But who else was going to do it? The pettiness of the whole ordeal makes my head spin. In my idealistic twenties, I campaigned in trees to stop motorways being built through forests… never would I have dreamed that two decades on, this would be the sorry state of the world I would be living in. The eco-enlightenment, that promised shift in global environmental consciousness, never came. I have a sickening suspicion that the new bollards will be ripped out again, under cover of night… perhaps soon after a Green Party loss, as a mark of defiance. I imagine the lawn in front of my apartment building will be full of cars one day, at the rate this is going. A Mad Max-like society, with ever-larger and tank-like SUVs aggressively claiming ever more space, appears to be the natural endgame to the current path we are on. I comfort myself that not all places are like this, other EU states have established a more sane and stable relationship with the car and its place within the city, and I think I may have to eventually flee to one of those states.

Maybe there is progress, but it is so slow I only see the pushback. I realize that while Germany is a decade behind the rest of the EU in implementing real change against a car-centric society, it is where I live in particular, Hamburg, which is another two decades behind the rest of Germany.

My faith in the German police and legal system is completely in tatters. But I won’t be silenced. I am prepared should anyone ever come to my doorstep with ill intent again — they will be in for a shock! This experience has triggered me like nothing else since my student protesting days. Now I am active and very vocal in all policy decisions regarding the local parking situation despite not owning, but especially because I don’t own a car. And now I am ten times louder than the others… and I feel I have to be, because I am old and wise enough to know that for every strong person like me who stands up to bullies, there are nine others out there who have been intimidated into silence. I don’t know who they are, but I am standing up for them!

Woe to our children who will inherit this mess.