With the rise in popularity of mobile payment methods such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, younger consumer groups have been comfortable paying for their goods and services via their mobile phone. However, the pandemic caused a seismic shift in consumer behaviour across all demographic groups – young and old. In the parking industry, demand for cashless and contactless payment skyrocketed and the introduction of Covid-safe payment options have transformed the way local councils and parking operators offer parking payment solutions forever.
Spring 2020will be remembered as the time the world went remote and digital. Consumer and business adoption of digital services took a major leap forward. What would normally have taken at least five years, was done in a mere eight weeks and nowhere was this trend reflected more starkly than in the parking payments industry.
“Even though there were fewer cars on the road, demand for cashless parking rose significantly at the start of the pandemic,” explains Anthony Cashel, UK Managing Director of PayByPhone, the global leader in mobile parking payments. “Local authorities, driven by their desire to protect not only drivers and but also council employees, accelerated their plans for cashless parking within council boundaries. As a result, 2020 was a record year for us with 40 new contract wins and, in some cases, we implemented a go-live in a new borough in just four weeks from appointment.”
A council exists to improve services and quality of life for its citizens and this example illustrates perfectly how local authorities are working hard to introduce initiatives that help their residents, businesses and visitors now and in the future.
Differentiated parking solutions
Cash-based solutions that have defined parking services for so long are limited in their scope. It is impossible to provide customised parking tariffs or to give exemptions to certain groups of people without a complicated scratch card permit system in place. These are open to misinterpretation by civil enforcement officers and are time-consuming to manage.
Digital parking solutions, on the other hand, provide councils and parking operators with bespoke solutions, which makes it easy to control who parks where, when and at what tariff, quickly and easy.
“The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) wanted to offer free parking to over 5,200 keyworkers at the height of the pandemic,” explains Cashel. “We worked quickly to provide the council with a working system in under two weeks and processed nearly 98,000 free transactions in the first six months.”
Bespoke parking schemes
Such bespoke parking schemes can be aimed at other groups too, for example for the management of visitor parking schemes.
“Our client Ealing Council experienced a very high demand for visitor parking permits. Residents and businesses were frustrated with the online booking system, a less-than-perfect application process for paper scratch cards, and time-consuming assessment for eligibility,” explains Cashel.
PayByPhone provided the Council an opportunity to solve the problem. “Today, thanks to our Resident Visitor Permits, the entire permit approval process now takes a matter of minutes as opposed to weeks, saving the Council’s parking team an estimated 85working days a year, and delivering a better parking service to Ealing residents,” he adds.
However, making payment for parking quick and easy for diverse consumer groups isn’t the only issue that councils are facing. Meeting strict environmental goals is another challenge.
Going green
The UK government set a most ambitious target to reduce emissions by 78 percent by 2035 compared to1990, which means that every organisation, business and individual will need to take active steps to reduce their own impact on the climate.
For local authorities the situation is no different. Each council will have its own targets to reduce carbon emissions and improve overall air quality levels. Cashless parking solutions help councils move closer to their environmental targets in a variety of ways.
First, they can encourage drivers to emit less by customising parking tariffs directly to vehicle emissions or fuel types. For example, drivers of environmentally-friendly vehicles can pay less, whereas more polluting vehicles pay more.
Cashless parking also removes the need for local authorities to empty and to maintain parking meters; fewer maintenance vehicles on the road reduces CO2 emissions.
“When the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea took 700 parking machines out of service, it reduced tailpipe emissions from its vehicles,” explains Cashel. “Moving to cashless parking meant that the council’s cash collection and maintenance vehicles, which previously drove 23,000 per year, no longer contributed to air pollution in the borough.”
The UK continues its move towards a cashless society mainly driven by a need for convenience and speed. Cashless parking solutions deliver so much more than that – it opens a raft of possibilities that improve overall parking services, as well as people’s lives and their living environment.
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About PayByPhone
PayByPhone’s aim is simple: simplify your journey so you can focus on what matters most. As a wholly-owned subsidiary of Volkswagen Financial Services AG, it is one of the fastest growing mobile payments companies in the world, processing more thanGBP550million in payments and over five million downloads per year. Available in nearly 1,300 cities across the globe, PayByPhone helps millions of consumers easily and safely pay for parking without the hassles of coins, queues or fines. Its smart, intuitive technology is at the centre of its user-first approach, delivered to make everything as simple as possible. Its multi-award-winning environmental initiatives, Carbon Neutral status since 2019and cashless ethos, all contribute to helping it and its clients on the green journey in this interconnected world. For more information, please visit www.paybyphone.co.uk.
