Illegal parking costs the city eight million euros a year
A request from the left reveals that illegal parking costs Berlin almost twice as much money as planned in the budget. Fines can hardly cover the costs.
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You can see it more often in Berlin at the moment: a car is towed away, probably because it was parked wrong. Data from the Senate Department for the Interior, Digitization and Sport shows that this is not a simple impression – because the number of parked cars in Berlin remains high, but it is also becoming more and more expensive for the city.
After a parliamentary question from the left in the House of Representatives, it became known that the city has so far spent more than eight million euros on towing and securing illegally parked vehicles this year – instead of the 4.5 million planned for this in this year’s budget. First reported about the RBB. The funds planned in the budget were around one million euros higher than last year – but in the broadest sense it was not enough to solve the problem.
Contributing to the deficit is the high number of cars that have to be towed away. According to the interior administration, 61,000 administrative offense procedures for illegal parking have been initiated so far this year – related to 56,000 (in 2020) and 73,000 (2021). A fine starts at ten euros, the towing costs are usually 144 to 225 euros. Overall, illegal parkers would have to pay fines totaling 2.6 million euros this year. But that’s not even enough to cover the planned towing costs of 3.6 million euros – let alone the 6.8 million euros that have been incurred for towing so far this year.
Sebastian Keyburg, budget politician of the left, told the RBB that it also plays a role that external towing services and transport companies are no longer paid a flat rate, but are paid according to the time spent – but this is increasing because the workforce is increasingly stuck in traffic. That would have to be fought with a higher staffing of the fine office, i.e. Schlüsselburg. “It cannot be that the taxpayer subsidizes illegal parkers with amounts in the millions every year,” he said.
ADAC: Parking space in Berlin is “artificially short”
Claudia Löffler, spokeswoman for the ADAC Berlin-Brandenburg, is not surprised that the number of illegally parked cars in Berlin this year, as in the two previous years, remains high. “We are currently seeing a parking space management system that will eliminate a lot of parking spaces in Berlin,” she says. The parking space in Berlin is “artificially limited” – and this creates “parking pressure”. Controlling wrongly parked cars is of course important and necessary for road safety, emphasizes Löffler. “But you can’t control and you can’t offer solutions on the other side,” she says. “One also has a responsibility to offer sufficient parking spaces.”
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Despite multiple inquiries, the Berlin authorities have not presented the ADAC with any current figures for the parking spaces that have disappeared from Berlin in recent years, says Claudia Löffler – but you can see again and again how parking space is being lost, such as the creation of cycle paths in the for the conversion of Kantstrasse planned for early 2023. But this is happening at a time when the number of registered cars in Berlin is increasing. Löffler says that as of March there were 1.24 million cars registered in Berlin that had to be parked somewhere. The number of e-cars is also constantly increasing.
Löffler would like to see a solution-oriented approach to the question of parking spaces, including a comprehensive parking space concept and a uniform mobility strategy for the entire city that includes all road users. “Individual mobility is incredibly important for everyone – and that includes the car just as much as public transport or the bicycle.”