Reading Time: 2 minutes

Ticketless parking is slowly emerging as the answer to the question of building a frictionless parking system. An evolution over cashless parking, it not only eliminates the need for customers to carry cash but also a parking ticket. It thus relieves the worry of losing a ticket. While it is most popularly used across off-street parking facilities and multi-storey car parks, it could also be used for any parking area that has a recognizable entrance or exit.

How Does Ticketless Parking Work?

Ticketless parking is based on identifiers like license plate recognition or RFID to recognize a parking customer as they approach the parking entrance. Upon capturing this data, the access control equipment allows the customer enters the parking lot. On exit, the recognition software calculates the customer’s length of stay, assigning the parking fee to their online account. This means motorists don’t need to present a cash or card or spend time finding the ticket machine. If a customer doesn’t have an online parking account, they can make a cashless payment at a terminal or can create one before entering the lot.

In situations where you’d have to pay, you can simply pay for your parking at any of the Pay Stations. It can be easily done by entering your license plate and paying via credit or debit card or cash. Otherwise, you can even register your details with the system and simply drive to any exit. The parking fees would be deducted from your account.

Benefits for customers

For motorists, ticketless parking offers the following benefits:

1. Eliminates the need to locate and interact with parking payment machines
2. Eliminates the risk of misplacing parking tickets
3. Flexible payment options
4. Parking activity can be tracked online on a smart parking app
5. No long queues to wait in and no traffic congestion

Benefits of parking operators

For parking lot operators, ticketless parking offers the following benefits:

1. Eliminates the need to provide control devices and barriers in entry and exit lanes, saving on investment costs
2. Eliminates the cost of obtaining, restocking and throwing away paper tickets, thus improving ROI
3. Maintenance and service calls for control devices are not required
4. Drastically reduces administrative work
5. Helps deliver a frictionless parking experience, boosting overall satisfaction
6. Helps get an insight into customer behaviour and profile
7. Reduces queue times and minimizes parking traffic

Thus, ticketless parking leads to efficient parking management minus the chaos and blaring horns.