Offering customer parking facilities has long been viewed as essential for attracting customers to your business, and especially for retail outlets.  Offering free parking is not the end of the story however, because “free” parking comes with a cost to your business and if you are not controlling who is using this service, and especially for how long it is being utilised, then you are failing to optimize the ROI (Return On Investment) for your business.

Curbside parking outside your store is one reason why merchants look to prime retail developments, especially downtown, as the idea is that providing parking space enhances the convenience and opportunity for through-traffic in the store.  While this sounds like it must be true from an intuitive perspective, you may be surprised to learn that curbside parking meters were not installed by any city or municipal government, but by a store owner in Oklahoma way back in 1935.  He had the idea, correct in this instance, that he needed to ensure there was available parking for customers who were going to actually use the store and not just the parking.  Available parking was continuously in use, not by customers to the store but as a point of convenient parking for visiting the downtown area – the benefit to the store owner was negligible if it was of any benefit at all.

Regulating who parks by or on your premises increases store traffic by ensuring you always have available parking.  Frequently, this entails charging for parking (which goes against the grain as 99% of parking is currently free in the US), but it focuses customer activity on your store, not the merchant area generally.  You can offset the cost to the customer by refunding the parking charge against in-store purchases, which will not deter genuine shoppers using your business.  Another technique is to ration the amount of parking time that the available space may be used – there is little benefit to your business of a free space being used by a downtown commuter for the bulk of the day or a shopper intent on convenient parking who never crosses the store threshold.

Parking permit labels and hang-tags are simple to source – online parking permit suppliers can be used to readily find parking permits which are extremely cheap and implement into a controlled parking solution.  You do not need to be concerned about spending a great deal of time or money on designing parking permits, labels or tags as many suppliers who specialise in this area, already provide easy-to-use template designs.  By combining your business identity and logo onto parking hang tags, you also help to cement your brand name in the minds of the customer.

With parking space regulations, typically designed to control vehicle emissions rather than revenue enhancement, becoming more frequent amongst many city and town agencies, you can combine the parking control policy with your own environmental efforts to reduce your carbon footprint.  For over 35 years, parking policy has largely been a dormant topic, however this is now one area where improving business effectiveness and reducing environmental impact are in harmony.

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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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