Last Sunday we went hiking in the Palatinate.

From Deidesheim to the vineyards, a little paradise.

Other than us, more people found that, which is why the parking spaces at the edge of the forest were hopelessly overcrowded by late morning and not a few hikers parked their cars on the edge of the forest path, which is forbidden for cars.

Rainer Hank

Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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They would have better not done that.

In the afternoon we met a team of local traffic sheriffs who were clearly delighted with their fat booty.

30 euros per parking offense, ten cars alone in our place.

Later we met the law enforcement officers again, in an even better mood.

Deidesheim can be happy.

Drivers do not speak very well of Andreas Scheuer

30 euros for wrong parking will soon be a thing of the past when the new national catalog of fines comes into force. It has long been decided and should apply from September, even before the federal election. The tariffs are steep. In the future, parking offenders in the Palatinate will have to pay 55 euros to the municipal treasury. It gets even more expensive in the cities: If you park your car on a cycle path there, you can be fined up to 110 euros. You should also think twice about the popular parking in the second row: 110 euros are also due.

It is not surprising that drivers are not particularly good at talking to Andreas "Andy" Scheuer, the CSU's transport minister, whose house has issued the new rules: every second respondent from Automedienportal.net thinks that the price increase is for Illegal parking is "unfair". Wrong parking is often only the "last resort" in the absence of suitable free spaces, they say. The argument is understandable, but ethically and economically poor. There is no “final solution”; In reality, drivers want to cut the cost of long search times. Nobody is forced to drive into the city. The argument of the sad motorists would only be acceptable if the bicycle, subway or Uber had not yet been invented.

Is there a fair price for a ticket? 55 and 110 euros are arbitrary. Why not 70 and 140 euros? On the other hand, the 15 euros accruing today for two hours when there is no stopping or parking is clearly too cheap, even though I get annoyed every time about the parking ticket. Why too cheap? In Frankfurt I have to pay an average of five euros for two hours in a city center parking garage. How likely is it that a law enforcement officer will discover me in the no-parking zone? If he catches me every third time, wrong parking doesn't cost me more than the multi-storey car park. If he comes less often, if I do business, I have to add the bad conscience of my Catholic upbringing to the penalty.

This is reminiscent of a famous behavioral economics experiment in an Israeli kindergarten. There, the teachers were annoyed that the parents kept picking up their offspring too late. They introduced a $ 3 fine for each child whose parents were late to pick them up. The result: even more parents came later. They interpreted the penalty as a kind of legal price that is due in order to “park” their children longer in the after-school care center.