Kapitel 4 Blog

For the first article about bicycle traffic in Germany...I experienced that first hand. I drifted from the sidewalk into the bike lane on the sidewalk in a couple of cities in Germany to receive extremely disgusted looks aimed at me. I would love to see a friendlier biking culture here. Ann Arbor is good as far as US cities are concerned except for the fact that the roads are so bad, you need to ride a mountain bike so that it won't fall apart in route to your destination.

For the street crossing article, it was mentioned that people seem to now be crossing the street when they are not supposed to. Well, I think that trend has grown since 2006. In the cities I visited, crossing illegally was pretty popular. Definitely not to the degree of NYC, but I saw a good amount of it. Perhaps this is due to the large increase of people traveling abroad in recent years. This article was written in 2006, so it is pretty out of date.

Again with the third article, I agree with the German logical thinking. It is very similar to how I think so I don't struggle with this in Germany.

With the article on public transportation being on the honor system, that would never work here. I my two roommates and they both had the same response, "that's awesome". They said that because they think it is awesome that they could regularly go on the train without a ticket with a small chance of getting caught. This is just like everyone taking the risk speeding everywhere on American streets hoping they won't encounter a cop.

The funniest part about the disorderly Germans article is that the two "einbahnstrasse" signs makes complete sense. It is not that disorderly, because it is still orderly and easy to understand. That means there are no real disorderly examples they could find!