🚲 Mobility

Parkdatenmanager & VLIS Parking Guidance

Frankfurt's old sign-based parking guidance system on the Anlagenring stopped working in autumn 2024. The replacement arrived data-first: since November 2025 live occupancy from many city garages has been published on the municipal traffic portal mainziel.de and pushed to the federal Mobilithek, fed by a central Parkdatenmanager built in the city's "Parken und Leiten" (PauL) project and wired to the traffic control centre. The first physical sign of the new VLIS system went live on 7 March 2026.

Live 📅 since 2025 ◆ Source-checked

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-04

🚲 Mobility Smart parking Traffic management Open data

🎓 Lesson

Frankfurt rebuilt the cheap half first. Publishing live occupancy to a web portal and to the federal Mobilithek costs a data pipeline; putting numbers back on the street costs €16 million and arrives sign by sign. The limit is not the city's software but its suppliers: only garages whose operators connect appear at all, so the map's completeness is a commercial question, not a technical one.

Evidence• No measured figure

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Cost≈€16M (renewal programme)

FundingCity of Frankfurt am Main

📖 Terms in this entry: Adaptive traffic signals · ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition) · Congestion pricing

Sources

↗ Behörden Spiegel — 'Erneuerung des Parkleitsystems in Frankfurt' (trade press)2 April 2026: the previous system on the Anlagenring has been out of service since autumn 2024; the city is investing €16 million in the renewal; real-time occupancy on mainziel since November 2025; first VLIS sign in Weißfrauenstraße, a second planned for Battonnstraße in summer 2026.

↗ Der Frankfurter — 'Neues Parkleitsystem im Praxistest' (press)12 March 2026: VLIS went into operation on 7 March 2026; the sign shows live occupancy of the Hauptwache and Konstablerwache garages; the Parkdatenmanager developed in the PauL project is networked with Frankfurt's traffic control centre; operated by the Straßenverkehrsamt.

↗ Kommune21 — 'Informiert zum Parkhaus' (trade press)12 December 2025: the parking layer on mainziel.de; data go to the federal Mobilithek for telematics providers and radio stations; not all garages report yet — it depends on the operator; partners include the city's own parking company and APCOA.

↗ Rhein Main Verlag — 'Viele Parkhausbelegungen in Frankfurt sind jetzt online verfügbar' (press)8 December 2025: independent report on the launch of online real-time garage occupancy.

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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Compare this project

🇩🇪 Traffic Pilot — City-Wide Signal Prediction · Frankfurt am Main Same control centre, two outputs: it feeds trafficpilot the signal phases and the parking manager the garage occupancy. 🇩🇪 Mainova Citywide LoRaWAN Network · Frankfurt am Main Parking was one of the uses the utility advertised for its 2020 radio network; the city built its own data path instead. 🇺🇸 SFpark Demand-Responsive Parking · San Francisco San Francisco retired its parking sensors as too costly and priced from payment data; Frankfurt never had street sensors to lose.

Explore the wider context

🔑 Your Smart City Is Owned by Someone Else 🅿️ Smart parking guide 🏙️ Frankfurt am Main city profile 🚲 Mobility projects

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Parkdatenmanager & VLIS Parking Guidance” — Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/frankfurt-parking-data-manager/ (last verified 2026-08-04). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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