After a moment's thought, Rainer Michaelis names a meeting place near the Hotel Frankfurter Hof in the city center, where he's sure he'll find a parking offender in no time.

He wants to show clearly what is a central part of his work as head 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 squadron of bicycles he has specially ordered identify the first illegal parker: a construction site vehicle whose driver has neither kept the required five-meter distance to the intersection nor can he be seen anywhere in the vicinity.

Mechthild Harting

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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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.

The situation is different for the owner of a car parked in a disabled parking space a few steps further on the Roßmarkt.

"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 elbow 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 noticeable 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 are over when the car was the only determining factor for the street space, 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, a real philanthropist - has no doubt that it is the state's task to regulate cooperation in the form of road traffic regulations, and the role of the city is to ensure compliance to respect the rules.

"Mutual consideration, that's the magic formula," he says.

This can be achieved by everyone trying to take the perspective of the other person.

After all, every driver is a pedestrian at some point, and many people switch from cars to bikes and vice versa.

This "change of perspective" costs nothing, but creates understanding, says Michaelis.