Even veteran police officers in Berlin cannot remember such an accident. Strictly speaking, what happened on Friday evening at Alexanderplatz was not an accident at all, but a “dangerous intervention in rail traffic”, intentionally committed by the 57-year-old driver of a BVG tram.
The press office of the Berlin police described the incident on Saturday as follows: Around 9 p.m. on Friday evening, a 33-year-old taxi driver called the police to a collision on Gontardstrasse. On site, he informed the officers who had arrived that he had turned his taxi from Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse into Gontardstrasse and stopped there at an exit to let his passengers get off.
In the meantime, a tram was approaching on Gontardstraße in the direction of Rathausstraße. Because the taxi was still standing, the driver had to wait with the tram behind the Toyota SUV.
A dispute is said to have developed between the taxi driver and the BVGler, who has since got out, the police said, citing uninvolved witnesses. The tram driver then sat back in the cab of the tram.
Just as the taxi driver wanted to clear the path again and turn around in front of the tram – Gontardstraße between the Alexanderplatz station and the TV tower is designated as a dead end for car traffic – the tram driver accelerated, rammed the taxi and several meters into the tram stop pushed ahead.
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As a result, a pedestrian protection grid and the bus stop pillar were also damaged. One photo shows the heavily battered Toyota standing on the station platform next to the 50-ton Flexity tram, which was slightly scratched at the front.
The 33-year-old taxi driver suffered minor injuries, according to police. Alarmed rescue workers took both him and the 57-year-old tram driver to a hospital, where both were treated on an outpatient basis. It was not known on Saturday why the tram driver had to be treated.
Tram traffic on the busy route on the Alex was interrupted until shortly before midnight. The investigations against the BVGer are ongoing, according to the police, the crash does not count as a traffic accident “because we assume that the act was intentional”.
According to the police accident statistics for 2020 (those for 2021 are not yet available), 0.16 percent of the 126,000 traffic accidents in Berlin involved a tram. Only 0.06 percent of accidents were caused by tram drivers.
