An hour before the end of the shift, the station chief would say something like, "okay, let's make some money". He'd send us to one of several places known for easy pickings, and we'd come back just before the end of the shift with a bunch of tickets.
There was one particularly great intersection where left turns were prohibited. Late at night, when there was no cross traffic, many drivers would take the left turn there. One night, our crew wrote fifty tickets in half an hour at that turn.
This snippet from a conversation with OMG 2 (our second Old Mustached German) prompted the blogster to search for citation quotas in Germany.
Not only do quotas exist, generating city income from traffic tickets based on a quota system is commonly practiced all over the country.
Municipalities do not advertise it, but when questioned, they defend it without shame because it is legal.
An older article in the daily Die Welt, for example, on an increase of quotas for Berlin city traffic wardens in 2002, states that the city expressly justified the higher quota with a decrease in revenue from fines the year before.
An article in the weekly Focus from 2013 corroborates the facts, this time with leaked emails by the traffic department chief of the small town of Dietzenbach. The town had had a private contractor with a quota of 100 tickets a day and decided to maintain that after transferring the duties to city workers. This is to minimize revenue loss to the town of Dietzenbach, the article quotes the chief.
The stories by OMG and the press reports illustrate that German officials behave very much like their American counterparts when it comes to making money off of the citizens.
How much money are we talking about? The 2013 article says around 450 million Euros a year are collected by the municipalities. This figure does not include tickets given by the police. Police are a state or federal agency in Germany. and there is no municipal police force, and the money collected by police goes into the state coffers.
What the blogster was not able to find out, was whether there may be a profiling component to the practice. The dimensions of the issue are certainly not as egregious as in some American cities - Germans like to keep things more low key - but it would not come as a surprise to read that inhabitants of wealthier neighborhoods are targeted less.
Too many lawyers and others with the means and the will to contest tickets live in the better parts of town.
You can, however, get some consolation from the fact that the level of fines and accompanying fees in Germany is still much lower than in the United States. Also, in Germany, we have yet to undergo the ever so slightly creepy experience of being followed by a car for fifty miles on the freeway at exactly one mile under the speed limit.
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