The abundance of issues encountered while parking downtown plagues most of the university population, student and faculty alike. However, IUPUI’s Parking and Transportation Services is introducing license plate recognition technology, which may help.
License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology uses a database of registration and allows you to use your license plate as a parking pass. Using recognition vehicles, IUPUI’s parking services will be able to scan your license plate and identify your vehicle when the online permit pops up with your information.
The use of LPR on campus will eliminate the need for a physical parking pass and allows for transportation services to allocate a better parking system campus-wide. The purpose of phasing this technology into parking services protocols is to allocate a more efficient parking structure on campus.
Parking has been historically difficult on campus but the implementation of this new technology might help solve a few issues, like permit-less parkers hogging up parking space for staff and students, and making parking easier for everyone.
“Parking on campus has been an issue for me since freshman year,” Cole Morgan, an IU Kelly School student said. “My biggest issue used to be parkers without permits littering the lots and not being able to find a place to park.”
Integration of LPR technology on campus will also introduce a new parking system that allows for open parking spots to be transmitted in real-time to the university app, so students and faculty will be able to see these spots and not have to worry about finding a spot.
“I like the idea of LPR technology. It makes me feel like parking on campus is going to be more regulated.” Morgan continued, “I want to be able to park on campus easily, this seems like the first step towards that.”
Right now, this doesn’t affect the daily operations of students and faculty as physical parking permits are still in use; however, the implementation of this technology has already begun and is in phase two of testing.
Phase two incorporates the use of parking garages to allow for normal use among students and staff. They are currently testing the use of the parking garage gates to scan the license plates to determine parking permissions. The goal is to have this technology program fully implemented into the parking services protocols in the next three to five years.
“I love the idea of being able to use the university app to see available parking spots on campus,” Angel Neff, a freshman at IUPUI stated. “Figuring out where to park is hard enough but finding an available spot is almost impossible.”
Jenna Carter is a senior majoring in Public Relations. She is also a social media intern, and this is her first year with Campus Citizen.
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