Posted: Sept, 18, 2020 9:49AM ET • 4 min read

A parkade with a row of license plate recognition technology and parking rate signage

As consumer preferences move increasingly toward managing more and more automatically and through their smart devices, it’s more important than ever that building owners and operators leverage smart technology to stay ahead of these trends and continue attracting business.

So what is “frictionless” parking? Parkers experience friction any time they directly interact with parking equipment to enter or exit a facility or make a payment, such as pulling a ticket to enter a gated lot and using a pay-on-foot machine before exiting, or using a parking meter to pay for parking in either a pay-and-display or pay-by-license-plate environment.

So naturally, a frictionless solution is one that eliminates these touch-points for a customer. Regular users of toll roads are familiar with Transponders that signal paid access to the road, an example of a frictionless solution.

A frictionless solution for parking can be achieved in a few ways.

Permit Access Control

Long range transponders are a reliable method for verifying permit credentials, with some systems reading –in-car transponders from up to 30 feet away. Much like toll roads, you simply drive up to the gate and let the transponder do the work. One challenge; customers who regularly use more than one vehicle may forget to move their transponder or access card to the vehicle they’re using on that particular day.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) systems are now emerging as a reliable method of “card” access. Most of us never leave the house without having our phones or wearable devices on hand. Now imagine that your access credential is linked to your phone (or wearable device); When you get to the gate, the BLE enabled reader uses Bluetooth to read this virtual card on you smartphone and opens the gate for verified users, without ever having to touch a thing.

Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technology can be used to recognize authorized parkers, and because more than one license plate can be associated with a user account, customers don’t need to worry about bringing their transponder with them. ALPR technology has the further advantage of being able to manage regular transient parkers who have registered their plate(s) with billing information. In this application, cameras will detect the vehicle’s entry and exit and the system backend will calculate the appropriate fee and charge it to the credit card associated to the customer’s profile.

Daily Visitor Parking

For both gated and non-gated parking facilities, this often means parkers being set up with user profiles in advance so that the installed parking equipment can recognize the parker as they approach and start their parking session.

In ticketless deployments where the vehicle’s license plate number will act as the parking credential, an automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) camera will capture and record an image of the vehicle entering the facility and begin the parking transaction. Before the parker leaves the facility, they will need to make a payment at a pay-on-foot station by entering their license plate number and making the required payment. When they get to the exit, the exit ALPR reads the plate, verifies that a payment is made and once that’s done, raises the gate.

And the emergence of smartphone apps like Precise ParkLink’s ParkedIn allow users to pay for parking from the convenience of their phone and eliminate the need to visit a pay station.

As promising as ALPR systems are for creating a seamless parking experience for customers, the technology is still not perfect: with successful read rates of approximately 95%, operators of large parking facilities can expect to experience, on average, a few issues per day. But there are solutions for this, such as adding a second camera to capture the rear license plate, or using the software system to manually edit the captured characters.

Final Thoughts

Ongoing research and development are improving frictionless offerings every day, and although redundancies can help mitigate revenue leakage, many parking operators may find these potential — and ever-decreasing — losses are more than offset by the significant reduction in capital expenditure. And by providing customers with a system that virtually does all the work, less time is spent idling in queues waiting to pay at the exit, and customers themselves have a better experience, which always reflects favourably on owners, operators and tenants…a win win win for all.