Road traffic in Frankfurt: traffic police chief reports
EAfter a moment’s thought, Rainer Michaelis names a meeting place near the Hotel Frankfurter Hof in the city center, where he is sure that he will quickly find a parking offender. He wants to show clearly what is a central part of his work as chief of the city traffic police: the monitoring of stationary traffic, as it is formally called. And indeed, it doesn’t take a minute before he and the group of bicycles he has specially ordered identify the first illegal parker: a construction site vehicle whose driver is neither the required five-meter distance to move nor IS to be seen anywhere nearby.
In the end, the man got off lightly: the company name and cell phone number on the vehicle saved him, and the car was not towed away. A few steps further on the Roßmarkt, the owner of a car parked in a handicapped parking space is different. “I don’t understand something like that,” says 62-year-old Michaelis, who has headed the Frankfurt traffic police since 2006. “It’s only a few steps to the multi-storey car park at the Hauptwache.”
This ignorance, this brusque mentality, this “Oops, here I come” upsets him. And yes, it is much worse today than it was 35 years ago. At that time, Michaelis began his career at the Frankfurt Road Traffic Authority after completing administrative training in Bad Soden. Now the “lord” of 223 municipal positions, whose tasks include traffic monitoring, i.e. penalizing illegal parking and speeding and red light violations, as well as regulating traffic at major events such as Bundesliga games and Dippemess, is retiring. He has already cleared his desk on Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse and his employment will officially end on September 1st.
Every driver is also a pedestrian
Fundamental things have changed on the streets of the city since he took up his duties. The volume of traffic has grown more and more, he says, and this has been particularly evident in the past ten years, during which Frankfurt has gained around 100,000 residents. But the cars themselves are now larger than ever before and take up more space. The result: “Everything is parked up.” At the same time, the times when the car was the sole determining factor for the street space are dying out, says Michaelis. Pedestrians, cyclists and recently also users of e-scooters demanded their space.
Michaelis – a man who always approaches people in a good mood and cheerfully, not a real philanthropist – has doubts that it is the state’s task to regulate cooperation in the form of road traffic regulations and that the city’s role is to ensure compliance to respect the rules. “Mutual consideration, so the magic formula has to be,” he says. This can already be achieved by everyone trying to take the perspective of the other. then every car driver is also a pedestrian, and many also switch from the car to the bike and vice versa. This “change of perspective” costs nothing, but creates understanding, says Michaelis.