NORFOLK, Va. — On Tuesday morning, Norfolk city officials partnered with the Downtown Norfolk Council to speak with parking garage users about the new system recently installed.
Chesapeake resident Theresa Newbill parks in one of the downtown garages each day for work. Newbill said she went from swiping her parking pass to scanning a QR code.
“It’s a little difficult," she said. "The new system works I’d say 50% to 75% of the time.”
Although it’s taken her time to adjust, she doesn’t mind the switch and likes some new features.
“You can put multiple license plates on one account,” Newbill said.
However, she’s hoping the new equipment will make big changes across downtown garages when large events and crowds of people come to town.
“It can cause a real backup, especially during the day," she said. "You might have to sit in line 10, 15 minutes to get out of the garage.”
City officials wanted to upgrade their outdated system.
"We had a system that was about 18 years old," said Ray Stoner, the director of the Norfolk Parking Division. "Most parking equipment life cycles are really about 10 years. If you get 18 out of them, you're lucky."
Stoner said they wanted equipment with more of a touchless transaction as well as one with license plate recognition. Those are just some of the features they hope will help people get in and out of garages quickly.
“License plate recognition, when it’s completely up and running, has a 90%, 95% capture rate,” he said. "That helps you with throughputs in and out of the garage. So people aren't fumbling for passes and things like that. We are not there yet."
Stoner said this system will soon sell parking tickets online.
"The parking industry sells passes just like hotels do," Stoner said. "There are vendors just like hotels.com and Trivago and others that we can authorize vendors like ParkHub, ParkWhiz, and ParkMobile to sell a certain portion of our passes to the public."
Right now, Stoner said his team is waiting for data to come in so they can better understand the peak hours of garage use.