Munich has some issues dealing with too many cars and illegal parking on the sidewalk is common.
The SPD mayor has the solution: change the law so that this rude habit becomes legal.
And what about pedestrians, people with wheelchair, strollers? I guess they’ll have to adapt.
Fuck cars!
I understand that they need to have it clear for first responders but parking on the sidewalk makes the sidewalk less usable. Also if first responders need to get through a street having the sidewalk available to get the car out of the way is more beneficial instead of street full of cars.
Then there’s the thing where cars will fill up the parking spots when possible and since it’s not a metered parking spot there’s a good chance it’ll not get checked very often.
In my view the result is effectively making the sidewalk smaller as if they would just remove it up to the 1.6m and replace it with on street parking. Investing in bike paths that can be used by first responders like in the Netherlands is a more effective way to deal with the same problem.
I would argue the space on the sidewalk has already been reduced and this plan would just limit punishment to those who truly deserve it. And if this is policy it should include the staff hours for parking inspectors. They could take note of areas where sidewalk parking often reduces space to below 1.6m and then have bollards or other barriers installed in these hotspots.
And, as I’ve also already mentioned, there should be more policies to encourage giving up on car ownership. I suggested free public transport for former car owners. New developments should include the need to build its own parking faculties on the property. Parking fees should be raised slowly but steadily. Resident parking only schemes could maybe push visitors to the area into public transport. There are more tools in that toolbox.
BTW I’m not a fan of this plan. My sense of what is possible, i.e. politics, just forces me to grudgingly accept this as a compromise. If you reduce the space for parking, say, by planting trees or other physical obstacles (which will probably cost more than this), you’ll be voted out. Politicians are more pragmatists than idealists. Nobody will stay in office long with radical anti car policies - as much as I would personally support that.
In the context of small Munich alleys where space is scarce, where exactly should they build additional bicycle lanes that can be used by fire trucks? The shining examples of fuck cars infrastructure like Amsterdam and Copenhagen tend to be on flat land or the great infrastructure doesn’t actually extend into the narrow capillary alleys that have been around since the middle ages. They also took decades to implement policies in increments to get to where they are. Munich is in my estimation probably at least a decade behind that.