Bike lane parkers are a common occurrence in many big cities in Germany. One doesn’t need to look for long to find images like these:

https://twitter.com/PascalStriebel/status/1093882960779063296

In Hamburg the Zentrale Bußgeldstelle (Central Fines Office) accepts reports from citizens that took images of these parked cars via email. A lot of other cities in Germany are doing the same, and there even exists an unofficial app to simplify the creation of the email. As even this wasn’t simple enough for me, I created a program that extracts almost all information directly from the image file, so it only takes me a few seconds to create such an mail.¹

So after I found out about this and there hadn’t been any effect through talking with the drivers, I decided at the beginning of April 2018 to take images and to send them to the email address provided by the Zentrale Bußgeldstelle. My first 8 reports where than directly in the street that would provide me with the most bike lane parkers, the Wilstorfer Straße directly in front of a big shopping center.

After some weeks I had the feeling that it has gotten a bit better in front of the shopping center, especially as some of the vans stocking a kiosk next to it stopped parking on the bike lane and instead used the street where they are legally allowed to stop and unpack.

But even this short success didn’t really hold on and I did continue to create around 100 reports in this street alone.

Map of the Wilstorfer Straße with a marker for each reported bike lane parker.

The place directly in front of the kiosk can even be seen on this map as the place with the most markers. The parking at that place is especially bad for the bike traffic as it is directly above a curb cut leading the bike lane from next to the car lane next to the foodpath.