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We talked to John Zara, the Director of Operations with Nexus Parking Systems, about the transformative effects of ExpressLane at the Hamilton Train Station, New Jersey. Read to know more about how going ticketless with ExpressLane has made life easier for the staff and commuters at the station, and explore how Get My Parking’s AI-powered solutions can boost convenience, profits, and customer satisfaction.

The ExpressLane Effect: Faster, Smarter Parking at the Hamilton Train Station, New Jersey

The Hamilton Train Station in New Jersey was opened in 1999, and has since become one of the finest transportation hubs in the northeast corridor, hosting around 4000 commuters everyday. Their parking is managed by Nexus Parking Systems, offering its visitors a completely ticketless parking experience.

For years, parking was ticketed at Hamilton – with commuters in a hurry to park their vehicles and jump on to a train to New York, lost tickets, long queues, and angry parkers were recurring problems that the station staff had to deal with. That changed significantly when they made parking available on NexPass, an app from Nexus Parking System that sets up passes, ticketless entry/exit, and easy parking payments. NexPass was built in collaboration with Get My Parking.

Recently, Hamilton set up ExpressLane, GMP’s AI-PARCS solution which automates entry and exit with the help of GMP AI, which corrects LPR misreads on the go.

NexPass lets parkers add cards on file to pay for their sessions and passes. The app keeps track of all their vehicles, payment methods, receipts, and validations. The parker can drive in and out without interacting with a machine or a human.

Payments are easy for drive-ins, too. They just tap their credit card to pay on the spot, or scan a QR Code inside the location to add their license plate and a card via a web app for a seamless exit. They can also pay on their way out using Apple Pay or Google Wallet, and download their receipts online.

The Hamilton Station is on its way to having the smoothest parking experience in the area!

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Interview: Examining the Effects of AI in Parking

We sat down with John Zara, the Director of Operations at Hamilton Train Station and a dedicated team member of Nexus Parking Systems. With over thirteen years of experience managing parking, John has witnessed significant changes in how the industry operates. In this interview, he shares insights on how the implementation of ExpressLane has transformed the parking experience for both customers and staff at the station.

GMP: Hey there! Wanna tell us a little about yourself?

John: Hey, I’m John Zara. I’m with Nexus Parking Systems, and we’re here at the Hamilton train station. I’ve been with Nexus for about 10 years, and I’m the Director of Operations here at the station.

GMP: So what was life like before ExpressLane?
John: Well, before ExpressLane, we were using the normal system with tickets and credit cards at the entry. It caused a lot of problems for us because the tickets would always be unreadable. A bulk of our customers are always going up to New York City. They’re gone for days, sometimes weeks at a time, so those tickets would generally be unreliable or unreadable, or they would get lost. We had a lot of unnecessary interactions with customers just for trivial issues.

GMP: Did that lead to long delays in clearing out parking?
John: Yes, it would cause lines because people thought they could just go right to the exit without issues, only to find their ticket wouldn’t work. That would lead to backups in the garage, with one person holding up everyone else. With tickets, we were always just waiting for something to hold up the lines.

GMP: How has ExpressLane changed the situation for you and your parkers?
John: ExpressLane has been great! It’s taken a lot off of my employees to having to deal with the same issues over and over. Now, we can actually get to the customers having a customer service issue. Now, people come in five days a week, we never have any problems. With ExpressLane, it simply reads their license plate, and the gate goes right up. I usually don’t hear from any of our customers who are here on a daily basis, which is good, because it tells us that we got the message across to the people who come here everyday.

GMP: How did your loyal parkers react to the Express experience?
John: They absolutely love it! Our NexPass users, the daily parkers, just drive in and drive out without having to worry about anything. They can check how much they’ve been charged through the app on their phone, without worrying about tickets or losing them. As long as their license plates are on their cars when they get back, they’re good to go.

GMP: Do people prefer the app or tapping in and out?
John: I think it’s a pretty even amount. I’d say that the person who comes more often, more than once a week, would definitely prefer the app. It stores all their receipts, everything’s in there for them. For a person that just comes in once in a while, they just want to use the option to tap in and out. Which is great, because I don’t want to have to force people to download the app if they don’t want to. So now with the Tap option, they can just use their credit card to pay when they leave. If they want a receipt, they can get their receipt as a text or on their email, and that’s it! 

GMP: Feedback from long-term parkers?
John: We have either monthly parkers or daily parkers here. Our monthlies love it here because they get everything on the app. They get all their notifications and everything. They don’t have to contact us the way they had to with the old system, where they would have to contact us just to change a credit card. We’d have to change their credit card for them, they couldn’t do it themselves. Now, just about 90-99% of things they have to do, they can do themselves. They only have to call us if they have an issue doing that, which is fantastic.

GMP: Is customer support easy?
John: It’s all great, because normally I only have to go to customer support when we have a strange issue. It’s something that doesn’t happen every day.

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