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Trucks parked on the sidewalk cause trouble on Gerberstrasse in Offenbach. It is particularly bad in the morning.
Christa Goede now has a pretty personal relationship with one of the drivers. “The man calls out to me from afar when he sees me. Asshole, stupid fuck, things like that ”. When Goede says that, it doesn’t even sound angry. The poor man, she says, has probably already paid a lot of money because of her, Goede, copywriter and blogger, lives on Gerberstrasse in the Mathildenviertel, a small street, known to some for the Caritas welfare station, and there is also a Rewe supermarket.
And that’s where the problem lies, according to Goede. The seven-and-a-half-ton trucks that supply the market often cannot drive straight into the driveway. That is why they park and maneuver on the sidewalk – despite the absolute no-stopping ban. “More than once I was almost crushed against the wall of the house,” says Goede. In the morning it is particularly bad when students make their way to Mathilde School and squeeze past the truck. She was advised to file a complaint. “The drivers have known me ever since,” she says.
Stephen Aranha, 47 years old, historian, says that in the morning he noticed from the stench in his apartment that there were trucks downstairs again. When he moved from Berlin to Offenbach about five years ago, he was surprised, he says, that in the city, and especially in the Mathildenviertel, it is so normal to park the sidewalks. “Often only one fits on it, and it has to be narrow,” he says. You can hardly get through with a walker or stroller.
Aranha is severely disabled and has difficulty climbing stairs or negotiating high curbs.
First fell, then threatened
At the corner of Mathildenstrasse and Friedhofsstrasse, the entire sidewalk is often blocked, says Aranha. Cars used to be smaller, he says, so there was more space against the house wall. A couple of times he got stuck on an exterior mirror. As a result, he fell once, after which he was threatened by the owner. Another time, the driver of a van threw a can of Red Bull at him. It was enough for him. Aranha went to the police. An officer there had advised him to let the matter go – after all, it was he who ran into the mirror.
The head of the Rewe store sends a message through the press office that he regrets the situation very much, but has no way of changing anything. The drivers who deliver to the market would have to ring the bell to open the loading ramp. This should only be open for a short time, otherwise complaints threatened again. Since he has no influence on the approach of the external suppliers, it could happen that a truck is already there to be unloaded. Then the next one would have to wait.
The city administration, in turn, sees the operator as responsible and wants to ask him again to adapt the processes. Bollards would not solve the problem at this point, according to the city’s press office. They would have to be placed half a meter from the roadway and would make the sidewalk even narrower. Gerberstraße is walked several times a day by employees of the public order office. jon
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