Parking solutions

Car finder

‘Lost’ vehicles across car parks continue to grow due to the increasing demand for spaces and continued growth of car parks in size. Now Siemens has developed and delivered an innovative ‘Car Finder’ system that integrates CCTV, digital recording, advanced automatic number plate technology, bay monitoring, barrier control and customer information kiosks to assist motorists in finding parking spaces and locating their vehicles on their return.

'Car Finder' begins to work as soon as a driver arrives at the car park barrier where ANPR technology takes the drivers registration and automatically prints it on their ticket. The data is captured in real time and stored in a central database. Information screens on each level of the car park tell the driver if that floor has any free spaces. Once the driver turns onto each floor they will be able to see free spaces which are marked by a green light above each individual bay.

On returning, if drivers cannot remember their spot they put their ticket into the ‘Car Finder’ kiosks to view the 3-D map. The map also shows access points such as lifts and stairs to make it even easier to return to the vehicle.

Barrier-free parking

The incidence and value of car park fraud continues to increase year on year, with car park operators reporting several millions of pounds in lost annual revenue. On and off-street parking are significant sources of revenue and as it is mainly cash income it is a high risk area susceptible to fraud. Siemens has developed barrier-free parking as a revolutionary way of preventing this fraud. Our system also offers speed and efficiency of parking through the use of automatic number plate recognition cameras (ANPR), fully integrated with sophisticated payment systems via a powerful software engine.

Barrier-free parking improves the customer experience by eliminating bottlenecks of traffic as there is no need for barrier-control. It makes payment quick and easy too. The system offers a choice of four flexible payment methods including cash-less vending, combining the move towards pay-as-you-go payment schemes and the convenience of online booking and mobile phone payments for season tickets or Pay and Display. This lowers the opportunity for theft from the ticket machines and saves labour costs, as the machines do not need to be emptied so frequently.