Licence plate scan No tickets required in Bonn parking garage

Bonn · The parking ticket taken at the entrance to a car park will probably soon be obsolete in Bonn too. A licence plate scan could soon be used to work out who has parked for how long. The system is already in use in one car park.

Something is happening in Bonn’s parking garages. New technology is being tested for Bonner City-Parkraum GmbH car parks and is already in use in the Südstadt car park, where drivers no longer take a ticket at the barrier. Fees have been calculated for a few weeks now using a licence plan scan.

If you drive into the parking garage from Bonner Talweg in Bonn’s Südstadt you no longer need to stop at the barrier and laboriously stretch out of the car towards the ticket machine. Instead, it is enough to slowly drive up to the barrier. The car’s licence plate is scanned and the barrier opens automatically. When the driver leaves the car park in his car again, he has to enter his registration number in the payment machine and pay the automatically calculated charge. On leaving the car park, the licence plate is again scanned automatically. If payment has been made, the barrier then opens again when driving out.

But what at first glance seems convenient also involves the collection of personal data. “We take such concerns very seriously,” says Tim Schmidt, the relevant project manager at Goldbeck, the company that operates the Südstadt car park. As soon as you leave the car park, the data is deleted, explains Schmidt. The Südstadt car park is currently the only one in Bonn operated by the company from Bielefeld.

The new system has been in place there since October. But there was already innovative technology in place in the Südstadt car park. In cooperation with the start-up Evopark, Goldbeck had linked access to a card that could be fixed onto a car’s windscreen. The cards contained radio chips that opened the barriers as soon as the car approached. Parking charges were automatically calculated by an app. However, to use this you needed this type of card. “With the new system there is no need to fix the chip onto the windscreen,” says Thierry Krauser from Goldbeck. Now all drivers can benefit from an uncomplicated method of time recording and payment.

Bonner City-Parkraum GmbH, which currently operates seven car parks, is also currently testing various technical innovations. The registration of licence plates is also an idea, says Werner Schui from Stadtwerke Bonn. “The attractiveness for the user and data protection have high priority,” emphasises Schui. All systems are still in the test phase. Schui could not give a date when the tests would be complete. However, ticketless parking in Bonn is conceivable in the future.

Original text: Stephan Werschkull. Translation: kc

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