The Handypark application initiated by the City of Antwerp, developed in collaboration with the associations of cities and municipalities (Brulocalis, VVSG and UVCW), and allowing to digitally check the parking cards for people with disabilities between officially in action on Monday.
It is already exploitable in Antwerp, Brussels, Ostend, Ghent, Genk, Louvain and Liège. About sixty other cities and municipalities will soon join, including the 19 municipalities in Brussels, Mechelen and Bruges. More and more Belgian municipalities and cities opt for digital control of regulated parking.
So far, parking cards for disabled people constitute an exception to this procedure for compliance with parking, as they are not digitized or linked to a determined registration number. Thus, PMR card holders, benefiting from parking derogating from the blue zone and the exemption from payment of the fee in the paid zone applied in most municipalities are not always recognized by the Scan-Car which therefore does not take into account the PMR card affixed to the dashboard of the parked vehicle.
Consequently, a parking fee is in most cases wrongly established for vehicles with a parking card for disabled people. The user holding a PMR parking card can now connect the vehicle license plate he uses at a given time to his parking card.
