Digital Tire Chalking: How LPR Improves Parking Enforcement

Tire chalking is a tried-and-true solution that many parking enforcement officers have used in the past to achieve parking compliance. However, like most traditional tools, new more innovative technologies have emerged to streamline parking enforcement and management more efficiently. 

How does tire chalking work?

Tire chalking is a more manual way to enforce parking whereby an enforcement officer will use chalk to mark the tires of each vehicle within a specific parking area. After the indicated time allowance, the officer will then visit the lot to see if any marked vehicles remain to determine which vehicles are in violation. 

Although this method is useful, it comes with a few problems:

• Rain or snow might wash away the mark, which can cause officers to miss it.
• If someone is familiar with the chalk method, they could wipe the mark off or move their car to hide the original mark. 
• If you’re patrolling for more than one cycle, you could be marking the same car more than once, which may seem intrusive to the parker.  

While tire chalking has proven to be successful over the years, more automated solutions are now available to make enforcement easier and efficient. Most parking enforcement tools feature License Plate Recognition (LPR) capabilities, which resolve many of the drawbacks outlined above. Rather than physically chalking each tire, LPR completes this process digitally, coining the term “digital tire chalking” or “allowance timing”. LPR also makes the enforcement process contactless, which is extremely fitting given the current environment. 

LPR technology allows enforcement officers to track and monitor vehicles from their handheld or mobile device. Officers simply scan the license plate, which then logs the vehicle into a database for future reference. If the same licence plate is scanned more than once beyond the time limit, the officer will then be prompted to issue a violation to the parker.  

When it comes to making any organizational change, system integration and cost are two key considerations. SecurePark's LPR solution is an accessible and affordable option, even for small-scale parking facilities. It helps to simplify the enforcement process all from the convenience of a handheld device, while providing officers with key parking data to make well-informed decisions in a given lot. If you’re interested in learning more about how our parking solutions can help you, contact us today.