Crawley's New Flowbird MiniPark Maximizes Customer Convenience

Visitors to Crawley in West Sussex will now benefit from improved access to and from the town center thanks to new parking technology commissioned by the borough council.

The local authority has been working with Flowbird to replace a pay and display system at its Orchard Street multi-story car park with a new MiniPark automatic number plate recognition scheme.

The council has invested to make parking more convenient for motorists and also to help improve traffic flow into and out of the 448 spaces car park in order to ease congestion on the local road network.

A spokesperson for Crawley Borough Council commented: “The Flowbird MiniPark solution, combined with the security systems installed in the car park, has made the Orchard Street facility a safer and more positive experience for visitors. Rather than having to predict how much time they will need for parking, customers using the new system pay only for the time they use, without worrying about over-running and incurring a penalty notice.

This system also recognizes season tickets, which again adds to the convenience for regular users.”

The MiniPark system is ticketless, with vehicle details logged by ANPR camera on entry and checked for payment on exit. There are multiple terminal payment options, including coin, card and contactless. Pedestrian access is secured by vandal resistant tablet devices that require the driver to enter their number plate, validating their vehicle is in the car park, prior to allowing access.

The off-street parking facility is also integrated into the council’s centralized management solution, which helps the local authority monitor and control all its town-center car parks.

About Flowbird

Flowbird is the world market leader in the field of urban mobility and smart city solutions. By offering a unique, all-encompassing range of parking management and public transport ticketing solutions, Flowbird has a presence in close to 80 countries and is successfully accelerating its growth in emerging markets such as Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Flowbird’s equipment and services are facilitating urban mobility in over 5,000 cities. Flowbird employs a workforce of c.1,300 people worldwide and achieved a turnover of 340 million euros in 2018.