”With the help of the electric scan vehicle and CityControl, the Municipality of Haarlem can inspect up to 1,200 vehicles per hour. Sander van den Brant, Parking Program Manager in Haarlem, explains: “While driving, the scan vehicle takes photos of the license plates of parked vehicles. CityControl supports not only fiscal parking enforcement, but also the enforcement of illegally parked cars.”
More efficient scanning through an up-to-date digital parking map
In recent years, enforcement using the scan vehicle has become increasingly efficient. Haarlem achieved a major efficiency gain by working with a digital parking map. Sander van den Brant explains: “Previously, the scan vehicle could not distinguish between illegal parking and paid parking. When encountering illegally parked cars, the driver of the scan vehicle manually switched off the camera so those cars would not be scanned.” Naturally, that was not efficient. The municipality therefore took a different approach. Sander continues: “Thanks to the new map layers, CityControl can now automatically distinguish between paid parking and illegal parking. Based on that, the citizen receives an additional assessment. In the future, it will also become possible to forward issues detected by the scan vehicle, such as garbage bags and defective streetlights, to the appropriate departments.”
Developing and maintaining the digital parking map is a substantial project for the municipality. The question is: who is responsible for it? Sander indicates that Haarlem is working on a parking information plan: “In it, we describe all the applications needed for parking and who is responsible for what. Who is responsible if something does not work properly? Who handles further development? Who manages the data? It helps to define those kinds of matters clearly. That prevents discussions.”
Remote Enforcement
Another major efficiency gain was achieved by enabling Haarlem to carry out inspections remotely using Sigmax DeskControl. The new ACI scan vehicle captures more images of cars and their surroundings, and the images are of higher quality as well. If a car does not have a valid parking right, enforcement officers review the images in DeskControl and determine remotely whether the parking fine is justified. Only in cases of doubt is an officer on the street dispatched to assess the situation. Previously, an officer always had to go to the vehicle in person to carry out this check.
