In West Lafayette, Indiana, parking enforcers have a new tool at their disposal: cameras. In the areas around Purdue University, tight parking has brought about heavy competition and squatters. People park for weeks and months and do not move their cars because they do not want to lose their spaces, reports jconline.com. Parking enforcement has been using chalk to address the problem, and not having much success.
“We’ve migrated from the old method of physically monitoring time and chalking to where it’s computer-based,” said Rick Walker, code enforcement supervisor for the city’s neighborhood resource team. The technology uses cameras mounted on a police vehicle to capture images of license plates, storing the resulting data in the cloud to track how long a vehicle has been parked in a city spot.
Chalk sounds about as efficient as square wheels right about now – a lot of completely manual solutions do. Using cameras speeds up the process and improves enforcement. They are not a cumbersome or risky solution. It seems like a good idea all around. West Lafayette signed a 3-year contract with NuPark for this system, which also includes a pay-by-phone parking app.
Read the article here.
