German Radio Traffic Alerts
By Lothar. Filed in Germany |
Today we celebrated the finish of our successful bike tour with a leisurely breakfast outdoors along the Danube riverbank. The sun was shining, as it has been all week, but now the weather report predicts thunderstorms and torrential downpours for later today. We have been really lucky with the weather in all the countries which we have visited so far.
We drove on the Autobahn from Passau, Germany to Biberach and the traffic alerts on the radio stations every 15 minutes went like this :
“Warning : a “Geisterfahrer” ( ghost-driver) is driving in the wrong direction on Autobahn # 8 near Munich.
Stay to the extreme right and do not use the passing lane.”
“Warning : a truck lost sheet-rock panels on Autobahn #6 ”
or : “There are people walking on Autobahn # 92″
or : “Horses are running near Autobahn # 57″
plus the usual road construction sites, causing back-ups for 10 to 20 miles.
Another great service is the listing of all the police radar spots ( “Blitzer” in German or “Flasher” in English) in and around the cities in your area, broad casted at regular intervals. The car radios in Germany tune in to the traffic alerts automatically and even increase the volume, if it was turned down. The tunnels have radio transmitters, so you never miss a beat, when you drive here. Not a bad service.
Monday, May 30th 2005 at 11:57 pm |
Yeah, the closest thing they have in the US is traffic alerts text messaged to your pager/cell phone/PDA. Definately not as convienient.
And I always wondered, what was the point of putting up a traffic camera if they are going to broadcast the locations on the radio, so you can slow down?