IP Parking Joins Parking Talks to Share Their Insights About PARCS and Barrierless Parking

With barrierless parking becoming a popular trend we asked industry experts to share their views about how parking access and revenue control systems will adapt. Pieter Sprinkhuizen, President and Lester Mascon, Executive Vice President of Sales of IP Parking joined our Parking Talks discussion, and here you can read more about their thoughts on how parking is evolving towards barrierless solutions, and the steps that need to be taken to protect revenue for operators.

Lester, How Would You Describe PARCS?

“I think like any resource, whether it’s water or food, or whatever it is, it has to be managed. With the parking resource available to a city or a building, the access, monetization, and management of that resource is very important and that’s why you need a PARCS system. A PARCS system specializes in management and access regulation, it controls the revenue coming into the facility helps you monitor that drivers are using the parking facility in the way that your parking rules specify. You can collect revenue for the transactions that you specify and you can receive reports for occurrences that differ from how you want your asset utilized.”

Pieter, What Are Your Thoughts on How Parkers Will React to Barrierless Parking?

“The concept of barrierless parking is one I like. For the person visiting a facility, it makes the entrance and exit very easy and fast. But, as a car park operator you need to be sure that the person entering and exiting the facility, is also paying for their visit, and a big problem with barrierless parking is what ID should be used to start, stop and pay for the transaction. If the ID is the license plate for example, then there is a risk that a driver can park for free for the rest of their life because they can simply cover part of their plate! It’s just a matter of time before people begin cheating the system, especially in airports where parking is expensive. Airports are really interested in barrierless parking, but they need to ensure that they can enforce payment.”

Lester, What Are Your Thoughts on Barrierless Parking, and Do You Foresee Any Problems?

“I love the idea of barrierless parking. I think that whoever can get it right and still hit the budget is going to be an absolute win! And, trust me, every day we are thinking about it and every day we are trying to come up with ideas on how we can achieve barrierless parking. Everything we are doing in development is trying to move us closer and closer to that place where we can take out all of the friction associated with parking. We are a unique industry and people are keen to skip the parking step at every opportunity. They can Uber or cab or walk, they will do anything to avoid parking. We always talk about the parking experience, but nobody wants a parking experience, they want to avoid it altogether. So I think moving towards barrierless would be amazing.

“Revenue and budget is probably the biggest barrier to completely barrierless solutions. Where we have seen barrierless solutions, often the goals of that facility are not necessarily revenue collection but more rule enforcement or maintaining the asset for a mall. There are two hours free parking in most of these places as it is, so barrierless will happen first in facilities that are less revenue focused.”

Pieter, What Trend Should We Be Looking out for at the Moment?

“I think the parking of tomorrow is not about what’s going on in your facility but what’s going on in your surrounding area. It’s up to us vendors to make sure that we accommodate that and provide ways of allowing those external data sources, apps, platforms and websites to be able to interact with the system that is provided by a parking access, revenue, and control manufacturer. That is done on a hardware level, with a large screen at entrance and exits that make it easier to communicate with the visitor, but also on a software level, with a large stack of APIs available that make it possible to interface with our system.”

Can You Share What The Vision Is For IP Parking in the US?

Pieter: “IP Parking in the US will be focusing on becoming a supplier of a service rather than simply equipment because parking itself is becoming more and more a service for customers. Of course, we sell hardware and we sell software, that entire package is what we do, but since there are so many other companies, data sources and such involved, the accommodation of all those external companies is something we can include in our proposition. For instance, pre-booking reservations, a combination of on-street and off-street parking and so on. For us in the market in the US, which is huge, that will be our main focus and our main technology push.”  

Lester: “I think Pieter is absolutely right when we talk about the whole parking ecosystem. There are so many people trying to be as close to the customer as possible, and I think our role is to put down this layer over the top of this parking asset and make that access easy. Parking is no longer just about the drivers that want to use a facility, it’s about all the other aggregators that want to have access to your parking facility. You just have to look at the airline industry, almost anybody can sell a seat on a plane but if you get connected to a layer that sits over the top of those seats, that’s exactly who we need to be. We are already easy to work with, we have a flexible product and we are a flexible company.”

For more insights from Pieter and Lester, and to see what Scheidt & Bachmann and TIBA Parking Systems think about barrierless parking, you can watch the video in full:

About IP Parking

IP Parking is a Dutch developer and manufacturer of web-based PARCS hardware, software and applications.

IP Parking's installed base currently consists of 700 installations in Western Europe, the Middle East, Australia and North America. Early 2017 IP Parking opened its US subsidiary in New York City.