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Berlin: Automatic control of environmental badges?

Now it's time to get to grips with Berlin's parking offenders! If automatic parking monitoring is successful, will it also be used in future to check environmental badges?

One thing is clear: with the creation of new bicycle lanes and the expansion of pavements, more and more parking spaces will be eliminated. This in turn increases so-called parking search traffic, that is traffic that drives around residential areas for hours in the evening to find a parking space. Even otherwise, with parking spaces decreasing, it is tempting to park somewhere where you are not really allowed to park. Because the risk of being caught has been manageable so far: the public order office does not have that many employees to check all parked cars. A single employee can check up to 300 vehicles in one day. This applies not only to parking violations, but also to parking in the environmental zone without the required environmental sticker.

Now, however, parking space monitoring is to be automated. With the help of a camera system from the Dutch company Arvoo on the roof of the car, the entire surroundings are recorded. The technology has already been tested in the Grunewald district, admittedly a district that does not really suffer from a lack of parking space. But for the time being, only the technology should have to prove itself. In cooperation with GPS tracking, the cameras check whether the parked cars are actually allowed to stand where they are. This system has been used successfully in Amsterdam since 2017. In one hour, a car with the cameras on its roof can scan up to 2000 cars.

Not only parking violators could be detected and punished in this way. In the future, the technology could also be used to check the environmental badge on the windscreen. In other countries and cities - Belgium, Denmark and Barcelona - it is already common practice to check the number plates to see if the vehicle is registered for the environmental zone. All cars that are then not registered or do not have a matching sticker are recorded with the camera and get a payment request. If this is done automatically, there really is no need for anyone to equip themselves with the correct sticker.