Parking tickets by text, smartcard driving licences and eticketing

Parking tickets by text

The City of Vienna has invested E15m (£10m) in a system that allows drivers to buy parking tickets using their mobile phones.

A year after the system went live, the mParking scheme has attracted 84,500 users who have totted up 1.8 million hours of paid parking.

Viennese drivers used to have to buy paper tickets from tabacconists, news-stands or kiosks to allow them to park in the city.

Now they can register online and send a text message to purchase an mParking ticket, charged either to their credit card or deducted from a pre-paid account.

When a registered driver needs to park in any the 110,000 spaces in central Vienna covered by the scheme, they text the amount of time they will be parking - say '30' for 30 minutes - and are immediately sent back an electronic 'ticket' confirming the length of time and the fee.

A major benefit of the scheme is that drivers are no longer inconvenienced by the limited opening hours of outlets selling the paper tickets, says Klaus Baringer, member of the Vienna Senate.

'We felt we had to make it easy for drivers to pay parking fees and we expect customers to change over to mParking in the long run because it is so simple to use,' he said.

'Tax measures are not particularly popular with citizens but mParking was one of the rare exceptions.

'The system is very well accepted by the public and it's good to have citizens who enjoy paying their taxes,' he said.

A particular benefit to mParking users is the reminder feature, says Baringer.

Users are automatically sent a text message 10 minutes before the ticket is due to expire to remind them to either move their car or buy a longer ticket.

The mParking scheme also simplifies the job of traffic wardens. Inspectors used to have to take down registration numbers manually and go back to the office to re-type the data into the city's administration systems.

Wardens now carry handheld devices which both authorise those cars with a valid mParking ticket and automatically update back-office systems with details of those parked illegally.

Siemens Business Services won the E15m (£10m) ten-year contract to develop and run the system from a shortlist of nine bidders at the end of 2002. The system went live the following year.

Driving licences in Slovakia

The Slovakian government is using 80 networked sites to handle the introduction of smartcard driving licences in line with European Union (EU) requirements.

The Ministry of the Interior signed a E6m (£4m) deal with Siemens Business Services in February this year to develop the centres across the country in time for them to start work on May 3, the day after Slovakia's accession to the EU.

By the end of the year more than 300,000 Slovakian drivers will have replaced their existing driving licences with forge-proof EU-compliant licences.

'To issue new driving licences it was necessary to create a new issuing process,' said Josef Majoros, director of department documents at Police Headquarters, Slovak Ministry of the Interior.

Citizens can go to one of the 80 centres with the relevant identification documents and have their electronic signature and digital picture embedded into the new-style card. Personal information is automatically checked against central government databases over the secure network linking the centres.

By creating a unified architecture they can be upgraded to deal with other types of ID as required, says Majoros.

'For the future we are preparing other programmes such as passports, which are to be launched in January 2005, and new ID cards, which are to be launched in January 2006,' said Majoros.

'These centres could also be extended in the future for new types of biometric such as fingerprinting for passports,' he said.

eTicketing in Germany

A small region on the German-Czech border is implementing one of Europe's first eticketing systems so passengers can buy travel tickets using their mobile phones.

The system, developed and run by Siemens Business Services in partnership with the Vogtland Local Public Transport Association, will go live in November this year and be available to around 280,000 people using the region's trains or buses.

A pilot of the project earlier this year saw 500 selected participants ordering 25,000 tickets using the system in ten weeks.

'The project goal was to test both the system and the user reaction,' said Karlheinz Meinel, general manager Verkehrsverbund Vogtland GmbH.

'We needed to know whether our customers would accept the proposition - and that certainly seems to be the case,' he said.

Travellers wanting to use the system register themselves over the telephone and download free software onto their Java-enabled mobile phone in order to use the system.

Once registered, users click through a series of menu prompts in order to buy their ticket, which is paid by a direct debit set up during the registration process. The virtual ticket is sent to the mobile phone and held on the central server so it is accessible to inspectors.

Registered users are also able to buy their tickets over the phone using a speech-recognition-enabled voice portal.