Little Toyota Yaris turns from Gadamerplatz in Heidelberg Bahnstadt to Galileistrasse. Andreas Fleischmann taps on a tablet installed next to the steering wheel. He drives along the street, the license plates of the parked cars appear briefly on the screen. On the back seat of the car is a large metal box with a Linux computer and a second with a battery. The Lidar scanner is on the roof of the small car-mounted on an ordinary bicycle rack-the Baden-Württemberg state government in Freiburg, Mannheim, Waldshut-Tiengen and in parts of Heidelberg tests the new scan vehicles. With the new state mobility law, the green-black state government has created the legal foundations for the use of technology and, above all, ensured that the scan vehicles did not trigger orwell fears among the citizens. The data protection requirements are extremely strict. The desire to apply this technology in practice also came from many municipalities. The traffic light government also wanted to create the legal basis for digital parking space management, but the legislative process was no longer completed. Local politicians and traffic planners hope that the current federal government will continue to continue the project. On the monitor you can see a photographed license plate, a street map, the coding of all recorded recorded and the activity of the all-round scanner on the car roof. The software confirms the recording of the license plate and the encryption of the data after a few seconds with a short signal tone. “The license plates are encrypted immediately, only when the second trip through the street is determined whether there is a parking authorization or not,” says Andreas Fleischmann, the managing director of the company that developed the scan system. Only the regulatory office, unless there has been a parking ticket, or there is no residents’ parking authorization, the data deciphered, fine notices are only sent after a manual examination. “Asymmetrical cryptography” is the name of the procedure with which the high data protection standard is met. The pilot test is a social problem that should not be underestimated: Rowdy -like parking behavior that endangers security. In the Bahnstadt settlement, which was only built in Heidelberg in 2008, which also includes many science facilities, there are sufficient underground parking spaces, but there are partly chaotic conditions in the streets. The citizens park too closely at the intersections, block access roads for rescue, fire brigade or police vehicles, hinder pedestrians and cyclists. In Heidelberg, a city with 155,000 inhabitants, 77,500 warnings are pronounced every year due to parking, the city also takes up around 8,000 private symptoms about violent parking behavior. The scan vehicles are intended to help remove the park chaos in the city centers and, above all, minimize the problems with rescue operations, especially in the narrow streets of the Heidelberg old town, this is a problem. City hardly finds a parking ticket control. The city hardly finds people who want to go through the streets as a parking ticket inspector. The scan cars are also much more efficient: a parking ticket controller of the city’s enforcement service controls around 50 vehicles per hour, and around 1000 cars are checked with a one-hour scan ride. “Without controls, there are many dangerous situations, especially at night,” says Mayor Martina Pfister (Greens). If the risk of discovery increases for false parking, the violations will also be declining within a short time. The system was already developed in 2019 by the company “DCX-Innovation”, in 2020 the scan units that can be used in any car without conversions were tested for the first time in real operation. In Warsaw and Paris, the car scanners have been in use for some time, in Germany the data protection requirements are higher. “We have therefore developed the software for the German project,” says Andreas Fleischmann. If there is a parking authorization, the data recorded remained only in the processor’s RAM memory for two seconds. The normal GPS signals are not sufficient to location the vehicles, the software accesses RTK correction signals. “All data is anonymized, it is not possible to retrospectively determine the location of the vehicle,” says Fleischmann. Only the regulatory office can decipher the data at short notice in the event of a violation. More on the theme of the theme of later police investigations, for example, no data is obtained, and they cannot be reconstructed afterwards. The city administrations, if they want to introduce the digital parking space control, have to create a technical requirement: Modern parking ticket machines must be set up in the digitally monitored parking zones that query the license plate when buying the ticket. “Our goal is more security, fairness and efficiency in the street,” says Raul Schmidt-Lamontain (Greens), who is responsible for mobility in Heidelberg. “Nothing changes for everyone who parks correctly. Then you will not be recorded.”
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