In response to a growing number of drivers in Luxembourg City who illegally park their cars and say to themselves, “it’s only for a minute,” all municipal parking agents will now undergo special forces training.
The intensive program lasts 42 weeks and consists mainly of evasion tactics, urban survival, and guerilla ticketing operations. The goal is ambitious: to totally eradicate illegal parking in Luxembourg City by 2025.
“After completing this program, agents will be able to spend days or even weeks on their own, hiding in the city and giving out thousands of tickets with little input from central command,” said Jean Weber, who is in charge of the program. “They’ll become predators, and not a single lazy driver will be able to escape.”
Once key feature will be airborne operations, in which agents learn to drop onto targets by rappelling from armored VDL helicopters that will circle the city every day, except Sundays and holidays.
Other key skills agents will learn:
- Rapid ticketing, i.e. learning to memorize a license plate number after a single glance and typing the number into the ticket machine without looking
- Survival, such as how to obtain to food and water in hostile urban environments, and learning which businesses allow agents to use their toilets
- Camouflaging, including how to quickly quickly make a VDL municipal agent uniform look like jogging clothes or a business suit
- Psychological conditioning, which consists of training agents to resist insults, begging, and other attempts at emotional manipulation
One unlucky Luxembourg City driver says she became the unwitting target of a training exercise last Tuesday.
“I was picking up my kids from the foyer, and I parked in the usual spot, which yes, says it’s for school buses, but in seven years I’ve never seen a single bus there,” she said. “As I got out of my car, I noticed that the wall on a nearby building appeared to – it appeared to be breathing.”
“When I returned to my car 45 seconds later, I already had a ticket, and I understood that the breathing wall was a parking agent camouflaged like bricks, and she was being appraised by a superior.”
