Hoboken is a New Jersey city which butts up against Manhattan – it occupies only one square mile, but every year, more than one million motorists use Hoboken to park their cars in – a huge headache for the city and for parking enforcement.  Using traditional parking enforcement techniques such as paper or plastic based parking permits, parking meters and exclusion zones required a huge amount of manpower to enforce and falsifying documents was rife.  Enforcement was further complicated by the limited practicality of taking abusers to court and the legality of impounding illegally parked cars or indeed, cars which had a permit but which was not properly displayed.

In short, Hoboken needed a parking enforcement solution which would definitively identify those vehicles which could be legally parked in a spot and which were undeniably, illegally parked.

The solution was to implement RFID tags into the parking permits issued by the city.  RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, and relies on the tag emitting a radio signal which in turn can be read by a “reader” used by the enforcement officer.  This process takes seconds and the information is instantly conveyed to the parking officer.  There is no need to check where a permit is located as the radio signal is emitted from the permit through the vehicle.  No radio signal means there is no parking permit and the vehicle is illegally parked, allowing a ticket to be issued.

The RFID parking permit also delivers numerous other benefits and advantages over the old system too.  Hoboken residents with a vehicle can now apply for a permit online or by using the telephone service, and overall, it is much easier to get a parking permit which saves the customer time but also saves the city time and money in processing the application and receiving payment for the permit.  This serves to maximize revenues to the city but at the same time, reduces the cost of acquiring these revenues.

RFID parking permits are extremely difficult to counterfeit – this means that fake permits are no longer such a problem in terms of lost revenues to the city and increased costs associated with the enforcement of the parking regulations.  Stolen parking permits were also a significant problem, accounting for a large number of vehicle break-ins and contributing to the crime levels experienced in the area.  As the RFID tag contains vehicle information which not only identifies who can park but which vehicle can be used, the RFID tags are not transferable and have no value to a thief or an unscrupulous motorist.

The RFID tag contains the make and model of the vehicle, the color, the driver’s license information as well as the vehicle identification and license plate number.  This makes identification of a specific vehicle simple and definitive and the reader which is used to identify the signal can readily display the information to the parking enforcement officer.

The cost of implementing the system was a mere $50,000 for the RFID tags and the reading equipment, and yet the benefits of the system have already delivered in the region of $8 million in increased revenues and reduced costs.

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