Initial Position
Cologne, the 4th biggest city in Germany has a lot of car users. The traffic is very crowed and busy, and in the rush hours the streets are paket with vehicles. Cologne has only a few parking houses, which are located either outside the city near train and tram stations and in the center of the city near the main shopping streets. Because of the huge amount of traffic, nearly every street has marked parking spaces on the side.
How the people park? Where do they park? What are the rules and what are the laws? How do the people proceed and interact with the car parking place?
We chose car parking as the topic and went out to the streets to observe cars. After observing many different methods of parked cars in the Südstadt in Cologne, we started to find similarities. Because we wanted to find out more about the behavior of the parking people, we decided to go to a more busy spot in Cologne.
The Bresslauerplatz is a place in front of the central station. People stop off there to pick up or drop off people. The space right in front of the station is a no parking zone. People still tend to park there for a couple of minutes or longer. After an observation from morning till noon, we discovered that instead of stopping off, there is a different system, we called short-time parking. Through the observation we created typologies of different car parkers, but found, that most of them still had the same connection to their cars.
