App-Controlled Barriers Pave Way for VIP Parking Without Cones

Providing a VIP experience for customers starts before they step foot in a store, restaurant or venue. If the process can be streamlined, so much the better.

“There is becoming a need and a want for what’s in the parking industry called ‘frictionless parking,’” Ethan Curtis, inside sales associate at Pacific Cascade Corp. and its ParkingZone division, told PYMNTS. “That’s where you basically have access to what is designated as only your spot where you don’t have an individual or a third party who is helping you in and out of that spot, clearing the space for you and monitoring that nobody else parks in it.”

Streamlining the Parking Experience

Traditionally, reserved parking spots would be secured by parking cones or a parking attendant. However, those methods add friction to the experience, cones can be moved and attendants can be ignored by drivers who are not approved to park in a space.

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Increasingly, though, the task of holding a spot is being performed by parking barriers controlled by mobile apps. ParkingZone recently announced that it had become the North American master distributor for a device of that sort manufactured by Parklio.

This solution includes a steel parking barrier bolted to the ground in a parking space and can be raised and lowered by a mobile app from anywhere in the world.

An owner or designated user of the spot can also share via email a digital key that gives others access to the spot for an amount of time specified by the owner.

Solutions like this are increasingly being used to provide a frictionless parking experience for corporate executives, doctors at hospitals, donors, university teachers and hotel guests.

Another use case that’s becoming more common is reserving spots at electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, ensuring that they’re not used as regular parking spaces by drivers of other sorts of vehicles. In this application, the EV driver will scan their code in the charging station, and that will drop the barrier so that they can pull into the stall and charge their car.

“I imagine that with the range anxiety, the worst thing would be finding a charging station that’s close to your [destination] when you’re on five miles of charge, pulling up to the charger and seeing that there’s a big old diesel truck or something,” Curtis said. “This product essentially prevents that from happening.”

Monetizing Premium Parking Spaces

As well as serving these functions, smart parking barriers can be used by cities, municipalities, parking lots and others who want to charge for spaces. The Parklio app has a fully customizable application programming interface (API) that allows adding payments and other features.

“The uses are essentially infinite when it comes to parking spaces that you want protected only for certain people,” Curtis said. “Essentially, anywhere you need the space reserved, whether that is for monetary purposes — if you want to start charging for those spaces because they’re at a premium, close to whatever you’re trying to park next to — or you’re just trying to prevent other people from accessing that parking space.”

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