lect Every Dime


“Are you sure you’ve only been here an hour?My records show you’ve been parked here since 1908.”


it look fairly evenly spaced. Just tell the driver that the fee is $70.The driver will pay it knowing that it is correct, and then ring it up as a one-day lost ticket. Nothing could be easier. If this happened once a day, the loss is $22,000 a year. License plate inventory has come a longway, baby, from


those days of keying in license plate numbers upon exit. LPR and the associated inventory software make it simple to check every car and ensure that the ticket presented is from the correct car. There is another dodge thatmay cause some pause. The wife goes on a business trip. She is gone for two


weeks. She parks in short-term parking and has a $280 fee. On her return, her husband, who happens to work near the airport, drives into the same lot and hands his parking ticket to her as she walks to her car. She uses his ticket to leave and pays nothing, saying she forget her briefcase and is within the 10-minute grace period. Her husband drives out and says he lost his ticket. He pays the one-day lost ticket rate. They end up cheating the operator out of $260. This was at an airport where they do not take license


plate numbers on entry but collect them by driving around at night, keying in or (using LPR) scanning in the numbers.The husband’s platewasn’t in inventory, so itwas assumed that he came in that day. Her ticket was only a few minutes old, so the systemdidn’t look up her license plate, since she couldn’t be in the database anyway. Had airport parking checked her license number any-


way, theywould have gotten into one huge argument that they most likely would lose. She was holding a ticket with an entry time of just a few minutes earlier; they were holding a bunch of bits in their computer. Oh, they might win, but they


would have a PR problemthat would haunt themforever. Continued on Page 42


OCTOBER 2009 • PARKING TODAY • www.parkingtoday.com 41


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