How does ANPR work, and how does it benefit your car park? Automatic Number Plate Recognition, or ANPR has been a mainstay of car park management for several years, but it does so much more than recognise vehicle registrations. ANPR is the foundation for many solutions that can transform your car park, streamline your services and ultimately, enhance the experience visitors to your site have. Explore more ANPR: The basics At its simplest level, ANPR is based on cameras. When a vehicle enters a car park a specialised camera records the number plate. Then, when the vehicle leaves, the number plate is recorded again. Think of it a bit like signing in and out of a building. Things get interesting when you use those entry and exit records to track and record more information. For example, time. Suddenly you know how long that vehicle was on-site. Now you can charge correctly for paid parking, accurately bill for an autopay solution, or if your car park uses a traditional pay-on-arrival solution – ensure that drivers have paid correctly for the time they’ve spent in your car park. From that basic foundation you’ve now got a range of parking payments, all driven by the same technology, but used in different ways, giving you a range of solutions to offer to your visitors. How else can ANPR support your car park? Paid parking is the tip of the iceberg. ANPR underpins so many more solutions and beneficial services on a car park. Data A vehicle registration holds more information than you might think. ANPR cameras can tap into that information and give you powerful data and insight around your car park and how it is used. For example, vehicle registration is tied to the make and model of the car – this tells you the type of vehicle and how it is fuelled. This sort of information lets you understand the number of electric vehicles using your car park and whether investing in EV charging would be worthwhile or not. You can also use data to track how busy your car park is at any given time, how people are paying for parking, how long visitors are staying and much more. This is all crucial information from your car park that can tell you a lot about how your business is performing elsewhere. Find our more about ANPR data Pre-booking ANPR gives you the ability to let people pre-book their parking on your site. The occupancy data your site generates lets you identify how much surplus space you have. Instead of letting that space sit and do nothing, pre-booking lets you promote spaces and drive visitors to your site who have found your advertised spaces, arranged their stay, and paid for their parking in advance. That booking is tied to their vehicle registration, meaning their stay is confirmed and monitored by your ANPR set-up. EV Making your business more environmentally conscious is a major concern for many companies. Adding electric vehicle, or EV, charging to your site is a major step and can represent a big investment into your steps to become greener. But EV chargers need to be used to be worthwhile, so how can ANPR help? First, the data you gain can tell you how many electric vehicles use your site, adding chargers could increase that number, and it also provides a beneficial service those drivers are sure to love. Charging bays can be prone to abuse though, they tend to be in premium locations on a car park, which means, like other dedicated bays, people in a rush will park there just to run into a shop quickly. That means when a visitor arrives in need of charging the bay is occupied and they can’t make use of it. At the same time, you now have an angry customer on your car park and your charger is generating any revenue or benefit for your business. ANPR can protect your chargers, for example, our ParkEV chargers house an ANPR camera meaning we can monitor and protect your charging spaces from misuse. That same technology also works in our Bay Management bollard, allowing you to apply the same sort of protection to other vital areas of your car park. Find out more about EV charging Permits Traditionally a parking permit involved filling out a form by hand, dropping it off somewhere and then staff had the laborious job of going through each application. This took a lot of time and resources. Thankfully, technology has progressed allowing permits to be integrated into a business digitally. Cloud-based permits allow businesses to manage permit applications on a much grander scale without the excessive admin or even the paper. Digital permits, coupled with ANPR, allow businesses to control their parking without having to issue paper permits. The cameras on a site track the vehicle registrations of cars as they arrive and cross-reference them against a permit database. On large-scale sites such as university campuses or complex hospitals permits represent a huge timesaving as well as a positive step towards environmental goals by cutting down on paper and waste. Giving you the tools to transform your parking ANPR, at least on the surface is incredibly straightforward. It’s how ANPR can be applied that allows a site to adapt and improve its services. At Parkingeye we are experts at helping businesses capitalise on how powerful ANPR can be. We help our clients identify the issues on their car parks and then implement the perfect blend of car park management solutions to eliminate abuse, streamline services, save time, increase footfall, and boost revenue. To find out more about ANPR, how it works and how it can maximise the effectiveness of your car park, get in touch using our form. 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