Woking Town centre
WPS, one of the UK’s leading parking equipment providers, is helping Woking Borough Council to provide a seamless visitor and resident experience with a series of ticketless car park upgrades as a part of Woking town centre’s regeneration.
Central to each installation is the use of WPS’s leading-edge Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) based parking technology, which reads a driver’s number plate on entry to a car park and calculates the parking fee based on their length of stay.
Before leaving, users have multiple payments options, including cash, chip & pin and contactless (including Apple Pay and Google Pay) at WPS’ ParkAdvance™ pay stations or via the WPS-integrated JustPark App. The customer keys in their car registration number at the pay station or enters a car park code in the app – once paid, exit barriers automatically open. The overall solution includes a web portal for managing season ticket / permit holders using the car parks. The WPS system also links real-time to the JustPark app to provide an ‘AutoPay’ parking experience, where regular users can exit and pay automatically for their parking by preregistering their licence plate and payment details.
New digital “VMS” signage will be installed both on approaching roads and in the new car parks, to help visitors efficiently find available spaces.
The IP-based architecture of the ParkAdvance™ system enables the straight-forward integration of multiple technologies providing total flexibility in system design, as well as a convenient, singular management and reporting platform. The system is also future-proofed, as it can be readily expanded with further features, for example to include retailer and leisure validation and loyalty schemes.
Visitors to the car parks will soon have the option to pay with their theatre or cinema ticket and retailers will be able to discount parking for customers who spend in their outlets. The ticketless system is a greener option, eliminating the requirement for paper tickets and completely removing issues that arise from faulty or lost tickets.
Cllr Ayesha Azad, Leader of Woking Borough Council, praised the excellent working relationship between Woking Borough Council and WPS, which allowed an exacting brief to be developed. She said:
“Our brief was for a seamless customer experience and an advanced system that matched the forward-thinking nature of the town’s regeneration, and this is exactly what we got.
“We are very excited about the enhanced, greener, parking experience that we will now be able to offer visitors to the town centre and can’t wait to welcome shoppers to their new, improved car parks.”
Simon Jarvis, Managing Director of WPS in the UK, says parking is a vital touch point in a visitor’s town centre experience:
“The Council had a well thought out brief that allowed us to work in partnership with them, JustPark and other providers to fully-utilise the best systems and services available. We’ve been able to bring together an integrated suite of leading technologies to create a solution that delivers the utmost in flexibility, efficiency and convenience for Woking residents, commuters and visitors, as well as the Council.”
Hannah Fuller, Head of Partnerships for JustPark, says: “Putting together this brilliant solution is a testament to the collaborative abilities of WPS, JustPark and Woking Borough Council. We’ve worked very hard to create a seamless payment solution, that includes our new AutoPay feature, allowing customers to set up their account to debit automatically when they drive in and out without having to think about it. It’s great to see all this coming to fruition for the benefit of the residents and visitors of Woking.”
The first car park to go live is Victoria Way, a multi-story car park open 24/7 that provides 932 spaces. It will be followed in early 2021 by Shoppers Yellow, Shoppers Blue, Brewery Road and Heathside Crescent. The newly-built Shoppers Red car park will also be launched with the new system.
The installation follows WPS and JustPark’s 2020 British Parking Awards win in the ‘Parking Technology’ category for a solution that combines the benefits of WPS’ ParkAdvance™ pay-on-foot parking system with JustPark’s payment app technology, designed to enhance the customer experience at multiple car parks operated by Cornwall Council.
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