Quote:
Originally Posted by BornToPun
Yea I thought about this more after posting and I may agree with you. But to be fair the added cost of my idea is extremely low. It just requires a touch screen and a two-minute timer.
Its a good idea and there is a sizable cost-benefit. The benefit is in areas where it takes a lot of time to park (which is very common in UK town centres and I assume elsewhere), the time wasted parking is a considerable deterrent to going to the town center at all.
Normally a car-park is linked with one particular big shop or a specific group of shops and they will definitely pay to increase people using their car-park. They already do - they have detectors counting cars in and out and advertise how many spaces they have free. I believe they are well aware that the big queues put people off.
I think you can also do it cheaper and better using existing CCV where its available and AI sofware to detect free spaces - they already use it to read car registration so I assume it can cope with this fairly easily.
To make it work really well in UK style car parks you probably need to monitor the location of cars entering the car park so that when a car(s) is already heading to a space(s) you dont direct someone else to it.