Better freeways - more burglaries

Here is a fun fact from German crime reporting: the number of burglaries has been going up in some areas of the country.

U.S. style home invasions are extremely rare around here, so don't get overly alarmed. Some areas that have seen an increase are rural areas with very little police presence, which can be fixed by more patrols and by setting up neighborhood watches.

One other explanation given by law enforcement every year is that towns with good freeway access are a preferred target of burglars.

Even to someone like the blogster, who has never felt the need for a great getaway possibility, this makes sense. B&E, hop on the freeway, and off you go.

The warning to residents near freeways is accompanied by suggestions on how to protect yourself. Make sure to have a modern front door, install lights with movement sensors, use timers to turn on lights when nobody is home, etc.

Again, the recommendations make perfect sense but there was the feeling that something was out of the ordinary.

Slowly, commensurate with the advanced age that is marked by the 30th birthday, a light went off after years of reading the annual newspaper blitz when the reports came out.

There was no suggestion to do something about the freeway access.

Usually, when there is a public order problem, many officials fall back on the "prohibit it" position. To this day, nobody has put forward suggestions aimed at making the quick getaway to the freeway harder.

Understandably, you cannot propose narrowing a freeway in Germany, or most other countries. Freeways can only go in one direction: wider.
The only known exceptions are in the U.S., but there it must be an earthquake that collapses a freeway. That's the only accepted solution. And then they build a new one, which soon suffers from type one traffic obesity, expressed as lane widening.

Surely, Germans must have some kind of plan to tackle the getaway problem?

They do not. There are hardly any speed bumps, and the few you can find are gently sloped so as not to damage the car if you go over 50 in a 30 zone.

The one street modification, if we can call it that, which may actually lead to some burglars not making it to the freeway or not being able to outrun the police, is not even recognized as an advantage!

Potholes.

The German road transportation associations have been keeping the government under pressure for more infrastructure funding. The industry may even get the government to introduce a nationwide toll on cars, in addition to the existing one on heavy trucks.

So, they whine about old roads and potholes like crazy, which you could call them from an American perspective.

And nobody, except the K-Landnews, of course, seems to realize the potential deterrent effect of a sufficient number and size of potholes vis a vis burglars.

After this praise of benign neglect of roads, we will sit back and wait for that one crucial news report in German tabloid BILD: Burglars caught as getaway car smashed up by pothole! Politicians want more potholes!

In the meantime, we will see if we can put hard numbers together on the sales increase of lighting fixtures and movement sensors. Given the astonishing amount of shelf space for these devices at our local home improvement store, most houses will soon have at least one of them.

We will do a scientific test by walking through one of the tiny nearby towns that have no street lighting at night, take notes of how many houses light up, then do the same walk next year.

Maybe we'll go to the mayor and offer the town a once or twice a night free neighborhood watch style walkabout! If accepted, we'll head for the electrical utility and get them to sign us up as freelance power consultants at 50% of the extra money they will make when we set off the movement sensor lights.


[Update Sep. 12] Just to be very clear: Overall crime is down in Germany. A trend seen in most if not all Western countries.