Prague, March 29 (CTK) – More and more Germans are leaving their car wrecks that they do not want any more in the streets of Czech border towns to evade fees for their disposal, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes yesterday.
The paper reports on the situation in Cheb, west Bohemia, near the German border, where a number of used cars from Germany, whose owners apparently wanted to get rid of them, are at public parking lots outside shopping centres and at housing estates. Some of them are parked there for months and the town cannot force their owners to remove their property under the current legislation.
“We have information that our German neighbours from the border areas drive their old cars to Cheb, have dinner, remove their number plates and keep the wrecks here,” Cheb Deputy Mayor Zdenek Hrkal told the paper.
Before a regular spring cleaning, the town registers some 20 apparently abandoned cars in the streets. A number of other cars parked there for long have number plates, but they lack valid maintenance inspection certificates and cannot be used, have flat tyres or broken lights and windows, MfD writes.
Foreign participants in car accidents sometimes decide not to have their cars repaired and to avoid paying their tow-away and disposal in Germany, they leave them in the Czech Republic, Hrkal said.
If such a car does not prevent road traffic or threaten the surroundings, the authorities cannot have it removed. They can tow it away only after six months and they must preserve the rusty wreck as found property for another six months before disposing of it, MfD says.
Unfortunately, the town mostly fails to identify the owners of such abandoned cars. They have either no licence plates or plates that do not belong to them, Cheb Deputy Mayor Pavel Hojda pointed out.
However, even if the town hall succeeds in finding the official owners and sends them calls for the car removal, they often do not communicate with the authorities, they report a false address or it turns out that the car is not theirs actually, MfD writes.
Petr Vomacka, spokesman for the UAMK assistance service for car drivers, says the whole border area has been flooded with abandoned car wrecks from the neighbouring countries, while their number is hard to estimate actually.
“The disposal of car wrecks is more complicated in Germany than in the Czech Republic. It is apparent that some drivers find it easier to take their car wreck across he border and leave it there than to dispose of it,” Vomacka told MfD.
