A common theme around the world in almost every industry is that the pandemic fast tracked broader digitisation which started a few years prior. Suddenly, the forced social distancing meant that solutions needed to be implemented immediately.
Parking is one such industry, where the rapid uptake of cashless, paperless, digital parking solutions is changing the face of something we have all just taken for granted for generations.
Demand for parking solutions, such as Parket, is driven by consumer demand and landlords’ need for efficiency and increased revenue.
This results in an old paradigm industry – which, let’s be honest, makes money for a number of stakeholders off sheer inefficiency – being disrupted at an increasingly rapid pace. This is a global trend, and one we are seeing gaining momentum in South Africa.
When the World Health Organisation announced that handling of money may contribute to spreading the Covid-19 virus, the drive towards a cashless society got a huge shot in the arm. Naturally, a country like South Africa that has a large and vibrant informal sector still depends heavily on cash, but one need only look around at the sheer number of tap payments, QR code payments, and more, to see that consumer behaviour has certainly evolved, and that there is less and less suspicion about the safety of technology.
Beyond that, the convenience that digital transformation brings cannot be ignored. Can you imagine sitting at a restaurant five years ago with no menu? Time and effort was spent on flashy menus that needed to be maintained, lest they got worn and looked old. Today a QR code takes you to the website menu. Advertisements in magazines and newspapers, products you buy – they all entice the user – who is most likely equipped with a smartphone – with a single click to visit their digital platform for more information – where data is no doubt used to curate an experience.
We all use applications daily. An app for this, and an app for that. Often, they are integrated and read information from various sources to deliver the experience we demand – in real time. To say that the world has changed, would be an understatement.
So, what then of the typical parking experience from the eye of a customer, or the person who uses the parking? It usually starts with placing a paper parking ticket somewhere and then trying not to lose it. If you do, you know there are penalties to pay. If it has been bent in your wallet or pocket, it might not work when you do eventually locate a paying station – which, if we are honest, may or may not work when you need it to.
If it doesn’t work, there is a button which calls a person who either helps you or annoys you, and this has a large impact on your overall experience of using the parkade. If it does work, you either pay cash, which is a pain for those who don’t enjoy carrying money, or you use a debit or credit card – if the unit works.
You then place the ticket back in a safe space, walk to your car and unpack groceries and deal with children as fast as possible to ensure you exit the parkade before the leeway period has passed. Once more you need to locate the ticket you put away amidst doing everything else.
Compare this to the experience of using Parket, for example. You drive up to the boom, your number plate is recognised and the boom lifts. You drive to the parking you booked with a few clicks. When you are finished doing your business, you go to your car and leave – and you are digitally charged for the time you used. No paper. No people. No fuss.
The second scenario is clearly more in touch with how our world has evolved from a convenience and customer experience perspective. We live in an age where time is literally money. But beyond that, the rapid uptake of cashless and ticketless parking platforms is driven by more than just the customer experience it delivers – which, make no mistake, is vital (we have picked up a remarkable return-use of the application by end customers).
On the landlord side, a key driver is the ability to efficiently manage empty parking bays in real time. For example, if there is an empty bay in a parkade and a driver en-route to the area in need of a parking space, who would not want to connect the two? This type of efficiency is only possible with technology. Vacant parking bays do nothing. Occupied parking bays make money. This is an important opportunity for landlords to earn extra revenue off an asset they already own. This cannot be discounted in an age where the habits of customers and employees have changed dramatically from pre-Covid patterns and there is an increased build to draw a simple and effective bridge between supply and demand.
Another factor driving the uptake of platforms such as Parket is the general trend away from Capex. If one considers a business moving to the cloud – essentially, they are rewriting the rule book: before, there was a huge Capex investment to set up data centres, while the Opex was dominated by maintenance and enough skilled people. Today, businesses can forgo the Capex investment and utilise various subscription services to do the same task more affordably, more securely, more efficiently and more safely.
There are similarities with parkade management. There would be a large initial investment in the payment stations and ticket machines at the booms. Then there would be substantial Opex required to keep it all going – maintenance of the machines, paper for the tickets, and people to manage various stations. People, as we know, come with a quantitative and qualitative cost: what do they earn, and what are you paying in terms of customer experience?
Earlier, I referenced money being made out of inefficiencies: think about the service costs, replacement costs, raw material costs, and more. For each of those costs, someone is making money and someone is spending money.
While customer experience, increased revenue opportunities and a drastically reduced Capex and Opex are currently the main drivers of the rise of cashless and ticketless parking platforms, there are other considerations which are going to become increasingly important and accelerate the uptake further.
The first is the impact on the environment, from discarding paper to eliminating fruitless idling, the lower impact on the environment is obvious for all to see. Another is the move towards smart cities – within time, buildings, parkades and roads will all be fitted with sensors that need to be integrated into various platforms that deliver a smart city experience. There is no place for dinosaur technology in this world.
Data-driven insights already mean that a platform such as Parket can deliver an experience, for owners of buildings, tenants and drivers, that is unmatched in terms of efficiency and revenue-generating potential. It’s this very ability to use real-time and historical data to improve the service that will see platforms such as Parket being built into a broader smart city network.
Another trend we are likely to see, in the not-so-distant future, at least from Parket’s perspective, is automated pricing based on demand. This is where real-time occupancy levels will determine pricing of individual bays to achieve a desired revenue target. This is not possible without the power of real-time data. Don’t be surprised to see pedestrian access, through turnstiles or the like, become integrated into the parking solution to offer corporate clients a single view of all their access points.
The horse has bolted, so to speak. It’s only a matter of time before everyone joins the party because the future has no place for acting like the past. For instance – if you want to share this article, will you print it, and fax it, or print it or photocopy it, scan it and then email it? The answer is a resounding no to both, because the world has evolved and there is no need to go through those laborious steps. Expect the same to occur with parking lots in a city near you, very soon.
