This paper investigates theoretical considerations on cartography and locality (Rizzi and Cinque 2016) with respect to grammatical structures in German, adopting quantitative tools and large-scale syntactically annotated corpora. German has represented an interesting case in the literature allowing restrictions (bottleneck effect) and freedom of movements (scrambling) of the constituents in different areas of the structures. Both phenomena can be explained in terms of locality (Samo 2019), which is quantitatively tested here. After having presented a model for mapping cartographic projections into universal dependencies (Nivre 2015), a quantitative study is carried out. Results confirm that the more dissimilar in terms of classes of features (Rizzi 2004) two elements are, the higher the frequency of an element lower in the structure in crossing an intervener. These results aim to add a quantitative dimension to the qualitative descriptions provided in cartographic studies.