The inspection service of Aerodrom Municipality has started removing wrecked vehicles from public spaces. The news did not come from the municipality - it came through a post in the Facebook group „Aerodrom Municipality - Citizens' Patrol”.

The group welcomes the move and calls on residents to keep mapping: „Let's carry on mapping locations with wrecked vehicles across Aerodrom, which we would then submit to the services for further processing.” They ask people to send photos and locations in the comments via Google Maps or a written address, „so we have as detailed and successful a clean-up as possible”.

Who is doing the work

Notice how the division of labour is set up here. Citizens take the photographs, establish the exact location, enter it on a map and deliver it to the services. The service then turns up with a tow truck.

That is the mapping of a municipal problem on municipal territory - a job for which there is a municipal inspector, there is a warden and there is a vehicle. Here it is being done by residents through a Facebook group, in their free time, for nothing.

It works. The question is why it had to work this way.

The numbers we do have

The municipality previously announced that 15 wrecked vehicles were removed in one operation, while the owners of another 22 removed them themselves after receiving notice. Estimates point to hundreds of old, unregistered and damaged vehicles across the whole municipality.

So 37 resolved cases against an estimate in the hundreds. The problem became more visible during preparations to extend zoned parking in Novo Lisiče and in Reon Centar - in May, owners received notices to move their vehicles so that parking spaces could be properly marked out.

Municipal regulations already ban leaving unregistered and wrecked vehicles, trailers and caravans on public surfaces. The ban has existed for years. The vehicles have also stood there for years, some of them turned into makeshift storage units or rubbish heaps.

Same pattern, different waste

In the same municipality, at the same time, residents are demanding cameras and fines over piles of rubbish around the bins. „This has become unbearable. Either cameras from the municipality, or patrols, so we can see who is to blame and have them fined”, one resident wrote on social media.

In its own Local Environmental Action Plan, Aerodrom Municipality admits that rubbish scattered beside the bins is a real problem and cites insufficient capacity for full management and monitoring. The regulations exist there too, and the ones responsible for enforcing them are municipal wardens and inspectors.

Two problems, the same structure: a rule that applies, a service that is charged with it, and a citizen who ends up pulling out a phone and starting to count on their own.