Parking Permit Management

Over the holidays, I piled the family into the car and took about a 350 mile trip to take in a hockey game and some museums. It’s something we’d like to do every year, but it turns out to be about every third year we get to do it. So we’re in a town we’re not entirely familiar with, and need a place to park for the game. We find a likely garage, and I watch as cars are turning wide into the next lane in order to make the 90 degree turn into the entrance. One car stops, puts it in reverse to get a better angle, and nearly backs into the car in front of us. I make the wide turn, get into the lane and try to pay the attendant.

“You pay at the office” is what I hear as he waves me on.

Even for someone in the parking industry that statement left me confused. Questions run through my mind, “Where is the office, do I buy a permit and display it, or can I just pay on the way out?” Well, I’ll find a place to park, follow the crowd and figure it out from there. So we follow the crowd to the elevator, and there are several people standing around. I’m staring at the unlit “down” button for a few seconds, and I can’t stand it anymore, I have to press it. I do, nothing happens and I hear a few snickers from the crowd, and a “Yeah, I tried that too.” The crowd starts to disperse toward the staircase, we follow in step.

The stairs lead out to the street, where we have to cross the incoming cars trying to wiggle into the entrance lane. From there, we see the “office” – a glassed in area with a couple of Pay on Foot machines. I pay for my parking, get a ticket and wonder “Do I need to display this, or is it my ticket out?” I watch the crowd leave the “office” and head toward the stadium, so I decide it’s my ticket out.

We have a great time at the game, our team won and the stadium is incredible. We return to the staircase that we took down, and realize there is no door handle on the outside. Luckily someone steps out as we are standing there, so I grab the door and we climb the stairs. We wait patiently as the crowd works its way out of the parking garage, watch as a few cars stop and the driver runs to the office to pay for parking while everyone else is waiting. I approach where I expect to insert my ticket, and there is an attendant there, taking the tickets and pressing the gate open button. I pull out, and immediately curb a tire on the way out. What a great day to be working in parking. There has to be a better way!

I came away from T2 Systems User Group 2010 with Becca White’s challenge in mind: take something home and take action. The energy and information sharing at T2’s User Group is always exciting. Previous years as a PowerPark customer, I often felt a little “left out” because I couldn’t learn much more or contribute to the “new” Flex users. This user group was one of the most beneficial for me and our organization than any before. It wasn’t all Becca’s challenge that inspired me to bring something home, but it certainly helped to boost my confidence as a lone attendee from our organization.

I came home and suggested, rather strongly, that we needed to implement the waitlist process in Flex. We have talked about waitlists for years, but there was always some reluctance to change and the promise that we would consider it later. I knew that Flex could meet our needs and the time was right to just jump in!

Waitlists were to replace what we called “Wednesday Permit Sales” that had been used in this office since before my time in Parking. The process went like this with online permit sales:

·         I would have to disable all student sales late on Tuesday afternoon.

·         The manager would give me the numbers of what permits would be available and to whom.

·         I had to check the control groups to be sure the right subclasses were included (since that often would change)

·         Allocate the appropriate number of permits (after being sure that there were hangtags available to accommodate the number to be released)

·         Our code made the permit sales available at midnight on Wednesday’s date.

·         Needless to say, the first couple of weeks when we would release more “prime permits,” we would literally have a couple of hundred students waiting up until midnight and hitting the site concurrently trying for that “25” or “20” or whatever number of permits. Lots of unhappy people, ones who didn’t get what they wanted, emailing us the next day, calling to ask when would more be available, etc. Also, the hundred or so who purchased all hit the office the next day to pick up the new permit (since classes were already in session, we required pick up). It was a cumbersome process to explain to students. Waitlist could solve these issues.  

I volunteered to take on the responsibility of a manual implementation: direct students to a page on our Web site with details about the “New Waitlist Process for spring 2011. “ They sent an email to our office with a “Waitlist request for XX” subject line. (It was some consolation that we would be able to address any ‘exceptions/issues’ on an individual basis by managing it manually). All I could think about over the holiday break when we were closed (our office is not an essential function on campus during breaks :-) were the hundreds of waitlist requests and emails that would be streaming in…I never voiced that anxiety but was confident it would all be done and it was going to work. The long term gain was well worth my short term stress/anxiety level!

I was pleasantly surprised that we only averaged about 50+ emails at the peak of requests. It was easily managed, they were added to the appropriate list and a reply email was sent in Flex to acknowledge they had been added. I had to create some subclasses and still change the control group to allow those awarded the right to purchase to buy online, but it has gone very well! We have awarded rights to purchase and sold over 200 permits, but it has been spread out over 2 weeks. It has evened out the traffic in the office. Phone calls have been almost non-existent since the third day of class. Less stress overall for the students and the office. Whew! It has been busy making it all come together, but it is a success and I look forward to the smooth transition to offering the waitlist option online for fall 2011! What a huge improvement for everyone involved!

Next project…Event management enhancements! I look forward to the new “what can Flex do for me now” session at UG! Thank you, Becca, for reminding everyone about how truly valuable the UG experience is (but I really did already know that! :-). I hope to see ya’ll in Indy, November 8-10!

I just returned from my first on-site customer consulting engagement since joining T2 Systems. I met with Jennifer, Dianne, Dennis, Kevin and many of the staff members at Western Kentucky University to discuss how they are using T2 Flex, what we could streamline and what current functionality is available but not being used. It was an enlightening experience for all involved, including me. Before my arrival they provided me with a list of processes they wanted to review prioritized by “It’s broken and we need to fix it”, “It works but can we make it better”, a “wish list” of things they were not doing in Flex but would like to be, and “Best Practices” – how is everyone else doing it.

I was extremely impressed by the integrity of their database. They run daily queries and reports to connect permits, vehicles, citations and customer records. No stone is left unturned when it comes to matching responsible customers to charges and they use all resources available to them including RoVR, student records, payroll records and appeals filed. 

During my two day visit I was able to observe the day-to-day activities and challenges and talk with staff who had carved time out specifically to review business practices. We found ways to prioritize wait lists using custom fields which will allow them to more fully take advantage of this feature in T2 Flex. We identified the difference between a pre-paid citation and a pre-entered citation which will allow WKU to accomplish the intent of getting the boot information in Flex without causing errors when the handheld ticket writer downloads the same citation but also without attaching a financial transaction when no payments have been collected. We also identified records that could be marked historical to save on screen real estate and processing resources which in turn save time. And what trip to a Parking Office is complete without the sharing of Appeals? Just as I remember – you can’t impound my car, I’m tenured faculty; I had to park close to the door because I had to go to the bathroom (yes, I cleaned it up a little for this blog); and I’m doing my part by riding a bike, you shouldn’t charge me for chaining it to the handrail.

While I was able to use my 12 years experience in the parking business and with the T2 products to offer suggestions, they challenged me with “How can we do this better?” at every turn. A lot has changed in the product since they implemented in 2005 and like most of you; business as usual has prohibited WKU from reassessing the capabilities provided by Flex.

If your department is interested in an in-depth review of your current business practices incorporating any changes since your implementation and suggestions to improve efficiency, contact your Account Manager or the Training Department at T2 Systems. So…on to my report for WKU.

Hello!

Since many of you are smack dab in the middle of permit season, I thought it would be approporiate to re-post something our own Maggie Vercoe, Director of Client Engagement wrote last year:

We are in the thick of Parking Permit Season!  It requires capitalization because of the sheer craziness of it.  Universities especially across the country are bracing themselves for the onslaught of students, staff, faculty, etc to hit their offices and their web pages to get their prime parking permits.

If you are just reading this, and haven't begun your planning, you might be in trouble.  Grab the bottle of Jack and hide under your desk until it blows over.

In seriousness, there are a lot of things that you can do to get through the season with little pain. 

1. Plan, Plan, and Plan.  Run reports over the last year in this date range to see what sales you did, by customer type, by permit location, permit type, and location of purchase.  This will help you to plan your communications to your customer.  For example, if you had more purchases in your office than online, now is the time to communicate to your customers what a great web page you have and how easy it is to purchase a parking permit online!

2. Map it out!  Consider laying out all of your parking permit configuration in a spreadsheet, for example.  This will help you identify all of your pricing structures, rules around your permits, and keep you organized.  It will make configuring them in your database easier every year if you maintain the copy.

3. Plan out what the week will look like.  Staff accordingly.  If possible, over-staff.  There could be lines out the door.  It may be useful to have someone handing out materials while you wait.  Rutgers University used to have a tent set up to shield the heat and cold beverages while people waited.  If you have to allow people to purchase in your office, this is fantastic customer service for a Department that is not always so liked by its customers!

4. If you do online parking permit sales, make sure that you have tested out everything with your new rules, permits, and pricing in a test environment.  This includes test transactions through to your payment gateway and file transfers to payroll or the bursar.  If any of your rules or software has changed, testing is key! 

These are just a handful of tips.  Make sure you plan early and involve all of your key players.  Good luck!

Well, it is summer.  And with it comes the fun of the kids being out of school... running around the house screaming they are bored, trying to find things for them to do... and pulling your hair out... while trying to remain flexible to the point where you don't snap... 

I guess I should jump to the positive portion of my latest blog… :)

T2 Flex v7.0 is officially out the door! The rollout has gone really well, and it looks like it is going to be loved by all. The coolest item: new buttons. Well, I guess many will argue that this isn’t the coolest item, but to me – it is pretty cool. I love the new look, and this alone would cause me to upgrade.

Other cool stuff? 

For those accepting credit cards online, PA-DSS validation is here and is part of the release.

Also, there is a new search filter that can be invoked after doing a search to better refine your search results. 

And the Event Management/PermitNow modules have been enhanced and are much more flexible and easier to use.

There are lots of changes that you should read about online in our release notes that cover many other items, such as having the Amount Due on the vehicle record that displays the total citations due and other fees (like boot and tow) that’s owed on the vehicle. This is another one of my favorites.

 
If T2 Systems is hosting your Flex site, you will be notified soon on when you are scheduled to be upgraded.  If you host your own data, then the installers and upgrade docs are online and are ready for download.
 

And if not for the cool features… do it for the buttons. They are soothing and will help to eliminate the stress from working in a parking office each day.   :)

We are back from the annual T2 company meeting. The meeting was a huge success. We learned about new solutions coming from T2 including the new T2 branded parking access and revenue control hardware. This is cool, T2 Systems now has our own brand of revenue control hardware. This means we offer not only the parking industry's first unified software solution where parking operations can manage both the permits and enforcement and the access and revenue control portions of parking in one web based, fully hostable system, but we also offer the parking access and revenue control equipment in conjunction with our distributor partners. Pretty awesome, huh?!

Back to the T2 Systems company meeting. I promised some photos in my last blog, so below you will see T2 in action at the Shepherd Center. There we cleaned up a bit and installed new patios for the community.
 

Coming soon...IPI updates (and maybe some pics)..so stay tuned


 

When I think March Madness, I think events.  When I talk to parking professionals about event parking, I hear "alternate reality".  The day of a game, conference or expo that somehow parking got "stuck" supporting.  In many cases the solution is, "Hold your breath and hope everything balances."  Or worse: "Hope the imbalance doesn't affect my employment."

By the way, for those of you who watch the TV show "Lost"; if Gordon Haywood from Butler hits that half-court shot does a parallel universe get created where we exist in both places concurrently?  It really makes you wonder... I'd ask Tim Maginn, but he has better things to do (you know, than to watch "Lost").

But anyway, event parking.  How does it fit in with the rest of your parking operation?  Is it the part you always "throw together" and hope everything works?  Is it your alternate reality because it isn't as big of a revenue generator as parking permit sales or parking citations?  How does it fit in to your business plan?  Does the amount of time spent planning for events match the amount of event revenue you bring in?

For a girl who purposely chose a career in marketing and communications – not just because I’ve been writing since I was way young and everyone said I was good at it - but because I’m not AT ALL technical (just ask my IT husband or IT buddies here at T2), I’ve managed to build a career working for high-tech companies in high-tech industries. 

It’s funny to me that I’ve gone from working in the cable-TV and wireless phone test and measurement industry to working in the parking industry…who knew? All of this without a technical or engineering degree! I never figured I’d be getting paid to make the installation and network monitoring equipment for CATV networks and test equipment for cell phones and wireless networks sound and look cool. And now I’m doing the same for software for parking: permit management, PARCS solutions, citation management and citation collections, etc. Wow! Isn’t that exciting (can you hear it in my voice?).  Actually, it is kind of cool.

Yes, although most don’t know it, parking is actually a technical industry. Sure, it’s not the same as NASA or computers and servers, but there’s a lot of technology behind parking – and it is exciting.

And now that Spring is here (the couple of 70-degree days we have had here in Indiana have been teasing us), it’s also officially tradeshow season. In addition to Spring Break, I’m also counting down the days until the International Parking Institute (IPI) annual conference and tradeshow (no, not just because it’s in Vegas). For those of you looking to find more information about municipal or city parking solutions, campus parking solutions, access and revenue control, software for parking and parking technology, Spring brings many opportunities to meet with vendors and network with other parking professionals. From Chicago to New England, to Texas to Las Vegas – no matter what geographic area - there are many conferences planned in the coming months and now’s the time to go and see what’s happening in our industry! And of course come see T2 – we’re either exhibiting or sponsoring (and attending) most of these events. We have some new news to share about our PARCS and event parking management solutions. Learn how technology (and T2 of course) can be your friend as you try to improve your parking operations.

When you stop and think about it, even us non-techies watch cable TV, have a computer, use a cell phone, and sometime or another have to park our car. And there’s a whole lot of technology behind getting those parking gates to go up and down  – “things that make the world go ‘round” I say!

Recently I was visiting a customer site and I got the chance of a lifetime...I tagged along with parking enforcement officers. Now, some of you are saying "big deal, I do that every day." However, for those of us way, way, way behind the front lines, this was a fantastic experience.

We started out on a street with parking meters and immediately we saw that red light flashing. EXPIRED!! Yes! This is my chance to catch a parking enforcement officer in action. We jumped out of the van rather "COPS"-esque and off we go to issue the parking citation to the violator. We had to work fast, mostly because it was cold. There I was, recording his every move. Wes, the parking enforcement officer, wrote that ticket in a matter of seconds, slid the orange envelope of shame under the wiper blade and away we went, back to the van and on to the next adventure.

Our next parking ticket came on a permitted street. You know, I have no idea how they spotted the violator. I am such a novice. Anyways, the van door slid open and out we jumped, like members of a SWAT team. No permit, YESSSS! This time, Wes took a picture of the illegally parked car with his handheld ticket writer. Nice! That picture will go on to the parking citation in the parking management system which virtually makes the ticket iron clad.

After a few more tickets and a not so happy parker turned violator, we were back at the office. Wow, what a day. I am not too sure how the parking enforcement officers do it on a daily basis. My kudos go out to them!!
 

So when I first joined T2 systems nearly three years ago, I knew very little about parking or parking management systems. My only real exposure was as a parker on a college campus. And even with that, my experience with the Campus Parking Solution was only in the form of paying for my permit once a year.

So here I am running a data center full of Software for Parking. Just three years ago we had only a few dozen hosted customers. As of this week we're up to 135 and we're using all sorts of cool technology to keep all of these advanced parking solutions running well.

Just last week we passed the 1.3 BILLION record mark in our production databases. Three years ago I would never have guessed that parking software could generate that much data this quickly. It has been a fun experience growing this environment.

Keep those parkers parking. We've got plenty of room for billions and billions more rows. Maybe we need to invest in a sign that says "billions and billions parked". Hmmmm...

I currently work for the Transportation and Parking office at a mid-sized university which sees approximately 80% of its community commute in and out of the school by car every day.   We currently have four times more commuters than we have actual physical parking capacity on the campus. This is a scenario that has become extremely challenging for not only the administration, but increasingly so for students who often will try to arrive on campus hours before their class just so that they can secure some sort of parking in time for their class to start.   In the first few weeks of semesters, it becomes such a tight situation on the campus that members of the community can often wait over an hour to find a space. This is problematic in many ways, especially from a safety point of view.

                As the administration, we have tried to write policy that enables parking permit holders to get what they have paid for and to simply protect their parking rights. Furthermore, we try to run a stringent enforcement operation to hinder illegal parking so that permitted parkers have enough space to park. Every time a newspaper, however, is published at the school we land ourselves on the front page and we are usually being slandered over the cost of parking, not having any free parking, not having enough space, parking enforcement being too severe, etc.  No matter what kind of customer service initiatives we have tried, how many hours we put into effective and transparent policy, what we do to update our parking technology on campus (we are still far from being 100% modern but that’s usually a funding issue) we often fail at keeping our customers satisfied and/or happy. (I’ve seen the anti-parking department Facebook groups and try very hard not to respond with wise comments!) I can’t imagine it’s because we aren’t doing enough, but it seems impossible in this industry to keep any customer happy if you are asking for money due to infractions or for the “price of real-estate”( as we are currently calling our parking capacity that falls in an urban landscape).

                So, I challenge any institution that has a multi-faceted parking operation, to bridge the gap between parking, meeting budgetary needs and providing good customer service. If you’re out there, somewhere, anywhere, S.O.S.!

I am watching "Disney's Prep and Landing" on TV a few nights ago. (Not because I have kids, but because I enjoy cartoons.) Anyways, how surprised was I to see a scene in there about parking? They even had a little elf parking enforcement officer in a "golf cart" checking parking permits and everything. Check it out:



So how far has parking enforcememt come to have a cartoon comment about it? WOW! It is pretty much mainstream now. People are beginning to realize parking departments are a necessity instead of a nusiance. Cities and universities see parking as a as a traffic management tool that has a beneficial by-product of increasing revenue in this time of slashed budgets.