At The University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, administrators recently took steps to investigate what they thought was a problem with parking lot capacity.
“People were complaining about the lack of parking spaces, but the university had no real way to accurately track day-to-day availability,” said BAYCOM Communications Consultant Kate Premo. “So they installed automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technology in two of their mobile parking vehicles to get a better sense of what was happening, and what they found was surprising. There are actually plenty of parking spaces available; it’s just that people apparently don’t like parking away from buildings.”
In addition to debunking the myth that there aren’t enough parking spaces across campus, the ALPR system, now being supported by BAYCOM, will give the university a greater capacity to:
- Generate revenue: Because the university now knows exactly how many parking spaces are available, it’s actually able to sell more parking permits. Since deploying the system, UW-LaCrosse has issued 200 additional permits and increased permit revenue by 10% year over year. Event-parking revenue is also up 20%.
- Combat fraud: Instead of issuing paper permits, students and staff now buy parking permits online based on their license plate number. This ‘pay by plate’ functionality minimizes the risk that permits will be shared between multiple people or vehicles. Plus, it eliminates the time and effort required to print, issue and check on paper permits, which saves the university $30,000 a year in labor and materials.
- Enhance security: If there’s a known individual that’s banned from campus, for example, and a license plate can be associated with that person, the system can send an immediate alert if that car is driven by a camera or parking truck equipped with an ALPR scanner.
- Provide critical information or evidence: If an incident does happen on or near campus, the ALPR technology can help lead to the capture or conviction of a criminal. For example, if a witness got a partial license plate number following an incident, the system can be queried to show all plates showing those letters or numbers, and indicate the time and location of all matching vehicles.
At BAYCOM, we’re now partnering with Genetec to deliver and support license plate recognition solutions specifically designed to help enforce parking regulations on large campuses. Not only is the Genetec solution best in class for this application, it’s also cloud-based, so there’s no need for on-site storage of data or significant involvement from our customers’ IT teams.
Learn more on our website about automatic license plate recognition solutions from BAYCOM.