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Multi-Bay Pay Stations: The Next Generation in On-Street Parking
New innovations in parking technology are gaining ground as municipalities investigate strategies that will provide greater operating efficiencies and yield more revenue from their parking assets.
This has led to a technological overhaul of that most enduring icon of on-street parking — the single-space, coin-operated meter. Regarded in the past as a necessity of parking management, this aging technology is being overtaken by the more practical need to turn revenue control into revenue growth, while at the same time, reducing costs of collecting and managing it. Furthermore, this need is increasingly factoring against single-space meters because of their declining reliability, higher maintenance and collections costs and parts obsolescence, inevitable with older technology.
As such, many municipalities are moving away from single-space on-street meters to “multi-bay” pay stations that offer significant benefits in terms of revenues, maximizing the turnover of spaces on a given street and streamlining enforcement. They also support a range of payment options including credit/debit cards, smart cards, bills and coins. They even have the ability to give change and store remaining value.
Smart media-based systems deliver high-speed transaction times and also provide significant value to operators by reducing fraud, increasing revenue collection and accountability, lowering operating and maintenance costs and increasing overall system efficiency.
This trend reflects the same shift that has already taken place in the world’s largest transit systems where contactless smart cards are emerging as the primary form of transit payment. For parking — a vital service in metropolitan areas — integration with the mass transit ticketing system is a natural step. For established transit smart card programs, adding parking as an extension of services goes a step further toward making transportation truly seamless from one mode to another.
Cubic Parking Systems is the only company to offer a contactless smart card payment system for on-street and off-street parking that is integrated and interoperable with public transit fare collection systems. This means that commuters can pay for parking their vehicles with the same smart card they use to pay for fares on public transportation.
Smart card payment means not only seamless transportation for patrons, it can also increase parkers’ compliance to pay at the meter. In most cases, it is not that parkers don’t want to pay; it’s that they have only one choice for payment which, for a single-space meter, is generally coins. If they do not have coins to feed the meter, they are more likely to risk a ticket because the need to park is so high. However, if given the option to pay with a smart card, credit card, or bills, most parkers will comply. In cities where multi-bay pay stations have been deployed, studies have shown that offering flexibility in payment options generates greater compliance by parkers by as much as 20 percent, thereby increasing revenues for the city.
Multi-bay pay stations are either pay-by-space or pay-by-display. For pay-by-space, the parker notes his space number, enters the space number on the meter, pays the appropriate fee and is on his way. The enforcement officer drives by the meter to find if all the spaces in an area are paid. In this way, the officer can enforce it like a single-space meter.
With pay and display, the parker pays his fee and places a printed receipt on the dashboard or in another visible location, determined by local ordinances. The enforcement officer checks each vehicle to determine that it is validly parked. A benefit of this method — because
the receipt shows
the amount paid
and the expiration
time is that the
parker is able
to take his unexpired
parking time with
him. If the individual
doesn't use all
of his paid time
in one location,
he can move and
re-park elsewhere
and, still displaying
his receipt, the vehicle will be considered validly
parked until the printed expiration time.
In either configuration, pay-by-space or pay-by-display, the technology offers greater flexibility and features over single-space meters. One pay station regulates several parking spaces, which means fewer pieces of equipment — a cost savings and a benefit to the city landscape because of the reduction in visual clutter. And by clustering numerous meters into one pay station, it reduces the number of revenue collection sites as well as maintenance calls that would be required to service individual meters, which drives down operational costs. In addition, multi-bay pay stations are solar-powered, further driving down operational costs.
Other benefits of multi-bay pay stations are the feature-rich capabilities inherent in the software. This includes a configurable display for customer instructions in multiple languages — an important customer service feature — and the ability to administer variable rates by time of day (peak/off peak) – enabling municipalities to capitalize on supply and demand. The sophisticated software also can track the operation history for more efficient maintenance and record keeping.
Further enabled by wireless communications, pay stations provide for the faster, more reliable automated transmission of data from the individual pay stations to a central system, allowing municipalities to better manage their parking systems. For example, wireless communications allow transaction records to be automatically uploaded and fee tables and software updates to be automatically downloaded at programmable times. The wireless communications feature also allows the pay station to transmit text alert messages to field staff for maintenance for servicing.
The ability to store and transmit electronic transaction records and create an audit trail that cannot be modified is an important advantage that multi-bay pay stations provide over single-space meters. Single-space meters have limited memories, and can report only what has been deposited in them since the last audit. And as frequently plagues cash-heavy businesses, there are too many opportunities for hands to touch the cash collection, leading to errors in reliability of what has actually been deposited and what has been reported.
By adding electronic payment options such as credit-debit cards and contactless smart cards, parking operators are able to get cash out of the system, leading to greater revenue capture, lower operating costs and reduced shrinkage from internal cash accounting. This phenomenon has been widely supported in the mass transit industry in cities where automated revenue collection systems have been installed. For example, in 1998, a year after implementation of their automated fare collection system, the Chicago Transit Authority recouped $11 million in shrinkage costs.
Parking management programs
run by local municipalities are designed to help
improve parking and traffic flow in the cities that
they serve, a task accomplished through a combination
of planning, engineering and enforcement measures.
The city departments that operate these programs are looking for greater efficiencies while at the same time being responsive to the community. As such, the trend from single space, coin-operated meters to multi-bay, pay stations offer many attractive benefits including:
- They provide drivers with the convenience of payment options
- They have multi-lingual capabilities
- They operate via wireless two-way communication
- They reduce sidewalk clutter by combining multiple meters into one
- They are solar-powered which provides clean and renewable energy consumption
- They are easier to monitor than individual single-space meters
- They dramatically reduce collections and maintenance costs
- They create an audit trail
In summary, the automated technology of multi-bay pay stations is changing the face of on-street parking and revenue collection — for the better. |
