Touchless parking solutions continue to gain steam and become more popular in parking facilities throughout the country. These solutions help create a much more seamless parking experience for customers, but also help to significantly improve the day-to-day management efforts of staff.

Since COVID, these touchless parking solutions have increased in demand as people are seeking to reduce interactions with others as much as possible. Further, customers are also now in search of opportunities to reduce the number of apps they must download, and rather prefer to pay for their parking through a one-time link, particularly when they are parking in places they don’t frequent.

While organizations (and the community) have become much more open to touchless parking solutions, they continue to have questions or misconceptions related to whether these technologies are right for their existing facilities. We’re here to answer some of the most commonly asked questions about touchless parking!

I have old gates. Do I have to replace them to implement touchless parking technologies?

No!  ParkEngage Touchless parking can use your existing gates to let your patrons enter and exit your gated facility as a transient parker on a reservation or as a drive-up using ParkEngage Mobile Pay. Further, existing permit holders can utilize ParkEngage Digital Permits to enter their regular facilities.

Automation is expensive, and I don’t have a large capital budget like the big guys. How can I use the latest parking automation on a budget.

ParkEngage touchless parking solutions require little to no up-front investment. ParkEngage can integrate with your existing equipment to implement ParkEngage Touchless Parking, Digital Permits, Mobile Pay, Reservations, Valet, and more!

Some of my customers don’t have a smartphone. How can touchless parking work for them?

ParkEngage Touchless Parking works with smartphones but doesn’t require smartphones to pay for parking. Customers that do not have a smartphone can enter, pay, and exit as a drive-up, park on a reservation, or use their digital permit without a smartphone.

I have installed a lot of technology in my garages over the past 10 years pre-COVID.  But now Touchless parking is the latest thing and I’m not ready to upgrade everything yet.

ParkEngage Touchless Parking can integrate with any existing gated system. Our solutions are pay-as-you-go and require little up-front costs and no equipment costs. We can work with you to identify the solutions that will perfectly complement your existing operation and equipment.

Continuing along in our series of future technologies soon (or already) coming to the parking industry, we’re discussing blockchain. Yet another technology generating a lot off buzz in “non-parking” industries but will likely soon be implemented to support parking operations.

Blockchain is a distributed, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and assets. An asset can be tangible (a car, land) or intangible (patents, copyrights, brands). A Blockchain platform allows users and developers to create novel uses of an existing Blockchain infrastructure. Crypto currency is currently the most popular application of Blockchain.

There are number of opportunities in the parking industry ideal for the Blockchain and distributed ledgers. This is possible due to the security, trust, and transparency these technologies bring, as well as their decentralized, open, and democratized foundations.

Examples of how the parking industry could start using Blockchain are business processes such as knowing your customer (KYC), digital payments, authenticating the customer and the automobile digital identification, and parking enforcement. More specialized examples include customer monthly parking contracts and permits, accounts receivable, controlling fraudulent damage claims in parking garages, safely hiring and managing garage employees and contractors, and paying hourly staff, and many more.

Since these technologies would provide a safe environment for the garage and customer to discover, connect and transact directly, one of the possible outcomes would be tighter integration of the value chain with middlemen like aggregators more seamlessly integrated to provide the bottom line for the parking businesses.