Welcome, dear readers, we would like to take you on an adventure through the once frustrating and unenjoyable industry that car park management once was. And trust us, it was awful. The hope is by the end of this article, you will understand where ticketless PARCS systems stand today and where they stand in the future. So buckle up!
The System Was A Mess
We are now heading into summer 2023, and by now, it’s safe to say that parking is a global pastime sport. According to industry reports from 2021, there are approximately 2 billion parking spaces in the United States alone. That means there are different leagues of car parks, rules, metaphorical fouls, yellow flags, and all types of annoying inconveniences in between. But if you think things are difficult now, trust us, they were much worse in the past. The first ticket system started in the 1960s, and it was basically a slow-paced system with paper tickets being punched out by a parking attendant. Operators had warehouses full of receipts and paperwork. Big car park operations had to pay 100s of thousands of dollars yearly on workforce and logistics, which was a complete headache.
As things began to digitize you would think things would get easier, but in truth, they just weren’t. If anything, the only difference is, now, you don’t need Mike Ehrmantraut (“Better call Saul” reference for all the European readers) in the booth punching people in and out of the lot.
But it’s not like these ticket systems are smart. They do almost nothing of value for both the operation and the end-user, and it’s not like you have genius high-tech programmers designing the BI behind them. So now, instead of a grumpy careless parking attendant who doesn’t want to be there in the first place, you have a laggy and expensive computer in the middle of your lot that everyone has to walk to and pay manually, and on a busy day after a baseball game or cinema, you have a line of cars still doing the same thing they always did. Wait in a long line of vehicles waiting for everyone to insert a ticket, and if everything goes well, the gate opens and on to the next one. A recent study for instance, revealed that ticket-based parking systems accounted for up to 15 minutes of waiting time per vehicle in peak hours. The process is obviously arduous for all the stakeholders.
And We Know What Your Thinking
“It’s 2023, for Mike Ehrmantraut’s sake, why can’t I provide my customers with a service they don’t have to interact with at all” – and yes, Mike Ehrmantraut is a god. The man went from being a small-time ex-cop parking attendant to one of the most dangerous men in the fictional cartel system of New Mexico! In fact, from now on, in every Technoso article, if the word god is ever supposed to be mentioned, we will replace it with Mike Ehrmantraut.
Back To Parking
To answer your question. Ticketless systems do exist and have for a few years now. But most parking operations have not yet onboarded onboarding them, and most haven’t even seen one in person. Think of it like a novelty Amazon item that you see on TikTok all the time, but you’ve never seen one for yourself, and even if you looked it up on Amazon, it’s way too expensive, and you’re not even sure if it’s going to work. That plus the fear of downtime, is exactly the reason car parks are not rushing to make the change.
And until Technoso came around, they really shouldn’t have. Imagine you are in a stadium before the playoffs, a mall during the holiday season, or a busy resort in Hawaii. The idea of not having any system in place while you switch to Ticketless sounds terrifying, and that’s precisely what no company was offering.
Technoso and a few like it are the only companies in the industry that came to operations and said, “We can onboard you in conjunction with your old system.” Your team can be trained on the back office interface, and the cameras have time to be implemented and calibrated to your location.
Let’s Talk About the Cameras for a Second
The highest function of the current non-Technoso gate system in the industry is the connection between the ticket system and the camera. Either you manually implement license plate numbers for subscribed lot users, or when a ticket is printed, the camera sends a photo of the plate to the PMS, and the system will know if that car paid or not, and in the best case scenario, the system will know if you paid and you won’t have to use the ticket to open the gate. But that’s just the best-case scenario.
What You Need to Know
Technoso is one of the only company in the PARCS industry that can provide dealers and operations with a camera-to-system synergy that give them a high enough license plate recognition to take on ticketless (over 99%.) Our customers have a state-of-the-art BI system that they can access from anywhere in the world and any device they want, which can give them all the data, functionality, and user control of a 20-man team. They create no traffic off of busy city streets, save tons of money on paper tickets, and, if they wanted to, could basically become a one-man team. So if you are sick of your parking operation running you, and you would like to, just sit back and count the benjamins. Then in the name of Mike Ehrmantraut, make the Mike-damn switch already! This time you literally don’t have a dollar to lose.
