Laxenburg is a far cry from a megacity: The small town in Lower Austria located about 20 kilometers south of Vienna has a population of roughly 3,000. Its palace and palace park, though, are highly popular tourist destinations attracting visitors galore especially during the summer months and on weekends. To cope with the influx of tourists and, above all, make life easier for the town’s residents, a modern parking system was installed with the help of Schreiner PrinTrust and Worldline.

In his fifth year in office, congestion continues to be an issue of major concern to Mayor Daniel Berl. “We distinguish significantly between typical local traffic and visitor traffic on weekends. Following three years of hard work, we managed shifting heavy haul traffic away from the town by banning trucks. In addition, new sound barriers more effectively protect our residents.” To ease the weekend traffic burden on them, the town of Laxenburg has created ample additional parking areas for palace visitors on the outskirts—more than a thousand vehicles can park there for free! “We don’t mean to fill the town’s coffers because we always welcome tourists. For us, the benefit to our citizens and well-being of Laxenburg residents clearly takes center stage,” explains Mayor Berl.

The town with a rich history in which Empress Elizabeth spent her honeymoon is no doubt worth a visit. In recent years, the number of tourists has continually gone up, increasingly stretching the capacities of the available parking areas downtown. The new parking system now offers a parking sticker to the residents of Laxenburg enabling them to use special parking zones downtown free of charge! The label for application behind glass from Schreiner PrinTrust has an RFID chip and can be identified quickly and reliably by the town’s inspectors using a smartphone. The parking system supplied by Worldline uses the same radio transmission technology here as the one that has been used for on-street parking in Vienna for years.

Combined with the parking guidance system, the total concept noticeably helps ease the burden on visitors and residents in the town. Mayor David Berl summarizes the benefits, “Laxenburg stands for above-average quality of life and people getting along well with each other—with this concept, we’ve managed to accommodate diverse interests really well.”