“I also saw a thong on the license plate,” describes the driver of the parking control car

“People notice you more. They are curious. They look at the car and at me strangely. On the car because I have those cameras on the roof, and on me because a woman is driving. They would rather wait for a man,” describes Dominika, a twenty-four-year-old driver of a monitoring car.

We drive through the streets around Prague’s Letná. Dominička’s task is simple – follow the navigation and drive according to it. The rest is provided by a sophisticated system on the roof of the car.

He has been driving it for a year and a half. Eight and a half hours a day. She enjoys driving, so the perfect job. Almost perfect.

“People react stupidly to me. From cursing, to braking, driving into the opposite direction. Sometimes I wonder what people are capable of,” Dominika describes, adding a recent example.

“At the gas station, the man started cursing me for being a bonzac, if I enjoy smashing cars. It’s not exactly pleasant, but what can you do. There are weeks when no one notices you, and there are weeks when you get out of the car and curses fly,” he mentions.

He also hunts positive experiences in his memory.

“One gentleman brought a colleague a drink because she helped him pay for parking through the app,” he recalls after thinking for a while. On the other hand, there is no shortage of entertaining stories.

“Some people want to cover the number plate with their own body. At first they are surprised to see me, then they run to their car and sometimes even jump in front of it to catch up,” says Dominika with a smile.

Of course, he meets cars with covered license plates, so that the drivers avoid a fine. But she doesn’t really want to talk about it, so as not to be instructive.

“They cover it up with everything possible. From sticking leaves or covering with snow to underwear,” he lists various ways.

“I saw a thong on the license plate. Really. In Prague 7. The funniest thing about it was that it wasn’t so big that the license plate could be seen anyway,” he mentions a somewhat curious example.

“Everyone asks me if there is some trick to avoid paying the blue zone. I always say we are just drivers. We take the car, drive around Prague and return it after eight hours. You can see for yourself, I have navigation and I’m driving. The rest is on the devices on the roof,” he shrugs.

Number of registered offenses in Prague

Petr Bělohlávek, director of the company Iterait, which installs the monitoring vehicles, knows the technical details.

“Inside the monitoring kit are three large cameras that create a 180-degree panoramic image. On the side, there are two smaller ones that record a 3D depth map, and two infrared lights for driving at night,” he points to the roof of the white plug-in hybrid.

Precise GPS devices, positioning systems, accelerometers and servers are located on the roof, which immediately analyze and evaluate the data.

The route of the monitoring cars is determined by artificial intelligence.

“We try to have everything as automated as possible, so drivers don’t even know in advance where the car will plan its route. We have created an algorithm for this, according to which you cannot predict in advance where the car will go on Monday morning, for example,” explains Petr Bělohlávek.

The data collected by the cars is automatically, structured and anonymously sent to the servers of the Technical Communications Administration and evaluated there.

“We call it the central brain, which gathers all the data on paid parking and also includes the register of parking permits – i.e. resident, subscriber, carer, IZS cars are recorded there and so on,” TSK spokesperson Barbora describes her part of parking monitoring Lišková.

“When the system assesses that there might be an offence, it requests an evidence package from the monitoring car, which is a series of five to six photographs. They usually contain a photo of the street, vertical and horizontal road markings, the location of the car plus both of its license plates,” says Barbora Lišková.

Offense packages are validated for some time, perhaps due to a possible bank outage, and after a while they are moved to processing. This, in turn, falls under the municipal police.

“The word misdemeanor must be put in quotation marks, because the packages are before the so-called evaluation,” describes the next part of the process, spokeswoman for the Prague city police, Irena Seifertová.

“The evaluation itself is then carried out by the police officers. If it is evaluated positively, i.e. the number plate is readable and the vehicle is actually parked in the paid parking zone, it is entered into the system, the owner of the vehicle is identified and the offense is reported to the administrative body, which is the office of the relevant city district,” he explains.

According to data from the Prague City Police, drivers in Prague 1, 2 and 3 receive the most violations.

Violations according to the city districts of Prague

16 monitoring cars criss-cross Prague every day, essentially non-stop. They detect approximately 300,000 cars per working day.

“Some of the people who pay for parking are happy to have monitoring cars driving by them, and then there are those who hate our cars and think we are bonzaks. That’s just how it is,” summarizes Petr Bělohlávek.

How to live in the Czech Republic