REVIEW
driver. And then there is the whole issue of consistency of parking management across the UK.
Another can of worms is opened when it comes to costs. What is a fair price for a motorist unlawfully parked on private land to pay? If the price is a pre-estimation of cost, then how can discounts be applied, as a discount would imply the pre-estimation was too high? Until now the BPA has avoided putting a price into the Code, but the DfT has agreed to work with the Association to create a fair price. As an aside, Reynolds pointed out that the average price charged by a private operator working under the AOS code is £84, while the current maximum statutory charge for a parking contravention in a London borough is £130. Reynolds said that during the process of putting together a code of practice that is fair to all parties, he was in conversation with legal advisors on an almost daily basis. However, he saw the transition management as the major challenge. ‘Our job is not just to invent the code, but to help operators implement it.’
PARKEX REPORT Parking challenges
UNITING THE KINGDOM Representatives from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland led a discussion on national variations in parking management. Peter Lowe, chair of the BPA’s Welsh Group, said that in Wales half of the councils operated under decriminalised parking enforcement, with the rest being enforced by the police. Scotland’s parking, said Gordon Catchlove of Edinburgh City Council, is enforced under the Road Traffic Act 1984 in all but seven authorities. Two more authorities, East Ayrshire and Fife, will be decriminalising parking enforcement this year, but in most areas parking is enforced by traffic attendants. In England, as the BPA’s Kelvin Reynolds explained, civil enforcement officers operate in 90 per cent of the country. The remaining 10 per cent of decriminalised enforcement is largely down the east coast. Clare Mulvenna said that in Northern Ireland parking enforcement is a police responsibility, with enforcement provided by traffic attendants. All four representatives agreed that the BPA had a significant role to play in improving parking across the UK. Lowe said: ‘As a stronger, united voice we can influence government. We can give a consistent approach and that is a dramatic improvement.’
PARKEX REPORT Parking solutions
CONTACT: TAKE-OFF While pay-on-foot barrier technology still remains the parking management control of choice in the UK for operators of medium- and large-scale car parks in the UK, the range of innovative offerings available on the market is quite mind-blowing for operators trying to make choices on how they will manage their car park facilities and increase the footfall. So said Manny Rasores, parking consultant and chair of the Equipment Manufacturers and Suppliers Special Interest Group, as he introduced delegates to a range of new offerings from the technical teams who just keep pushing the barriers of innovation within the parking sector. ‘Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) has seen an upsurge in deployment in the past few years,’ said Rasores. He added that this was particularly true in places such as supermarkets, where they used time- constraints on parking to prevent commuters leaving their cars in supermarket car parks all day while they went to work. The use of ANPR technology in this country still doesn’t match its uptake in the USA or mainland Europe, said Rasores, but as some operators move away from ticket machines and barriers, so ANPR was becoming a popular choice. Rasores also spoke about the huge impact that payment via mobile phone technology was having on parking, giving customers another payment option and providing operators with a cost effective system. But according to the parking consultant, the major new players emerging in the market are the raft of new consumer options provided by contactless cards, smart phone technology and pay-as-you-go cards. These developments hand the customer a variety of choice and give the operator the chance to offer a really flexible approach. ‘With pay-as-you-go cards, the season ticket holder does not end up paying for days he or she does not drive to work,’ said Rasores, as he outlined the benefits of the new technology. ‘And contactless cards speed up the whole parking process of paying for parking,’ he added. ‘From an operator’s point of view it is also a cheaper option than the more costly chip-and-pin.’ With 20 million contactless cards already in operation, it is expected that all cards will have a contactless flexibility within
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