Parking enforcement: It’s a tedious task and not particularly exciting for enforcement officials, but it’s a necessary function that must be navigated by communities.

“People definitely like to stay beyond the time limit, or use varying payment methods,” said Jesten Ray, parking services community programs coordinator with Spokane, Wash. “They might pay points for two hours, and then they might use a credit card for two hours, and then previously they’d a mobile app for two hours.”

During busy times of the day or year, it’s even more critical that cities ensure parking spaces are available for those who need them. License plate recognition technology in Spokane is helping to ensure efficiency in this process for the city, which has a population of about 220,000.

“LPR has the potential to help you do enforcement. It’s another tool. For us, we have a large downtown, so we don’t necessarily walk the beats, we drive vehicles there – which enables us to get around much faster. We wanted a method that would help us get around for enforcement.”

The technology has been available since the 1970s when it became popular in the United Kingdom. After improvements in technology gave birth to license plate recognition cameras and the software to use them became user-friendly, the systems blew up in the 1990s and then slowly made their way to the U.S., where enforcement officials often drive or walk perimeters to read plates.

“It’s becoming more and more common, and people are adopting this technology because it makes them more efficient in controlling larger areas versus being on foot,” said Michael Bradner, product manager at Genetec. “A license plate reader can read between 4 and 6,000 plates a day, whereas an officer walking the street probably would be reading under 1,000 plates.”

Spokane began setting up the hardware through Genetec in January and was busy researching and setting up zones for most of the year.

“It’s a process to get it put up,” Ray said. “We’ve heard it takes a municipality about a year to really learn how to use it, how the system works, and set up the back end. Every city, I think, uses it differently.”

In March, the city implemented the new license plate recognition system, which includes a camera atop parking enforcement vehicles, a computer inside the vehicles and a complex software program that allows parking control officers to sort through all the vehicles parked in regions across the city. Payment information flows into the computer system as well so enforcement can also see who has paid, along with how long their vehicle has been in a specific parking spot.

“Each block face basically gets its own geofence,” Ray said. “You’re drawing points on a map, a parameter either around a lot or a block face for that zone, and you apply rules to it. Is there a time limit for that area? Is there paid parking in the area? It basically gets all the rules for our citation management system and our permit system pushed into it.”

Ray acknowledged that the department is still learning to differentiate certain parts of the zones, such as commercial loading zones, which have different rules than customer parking. Spokane has about 400 zones right now.

She and her staff are still very early in the process and are still determining how often data should be reviewed, as well as what data should be reviewed.

“We obviously have all the data. It’s just how we want to use it,” Ray said. “It’s learning how to use what we have.”

Genetec’s camera system recognizes the characters on a license plate and converts them to readable values for the computer to process. It’s a system that has the potential for many uses.

“The license plate recognition cars are generally driving for eight to 10 hours a day, reading license plates. You could use that to do parking studies,” Bradner said. “You want to know what areas are frequently used because you might want to increase the rates, increase the turnover, or you may want to say, ‘in this zone, I have more permits than I have people who are coming into the city’ and you may decide to adjust how each zone is divided.”

In Europe, such technology is now being used to determine the need for electric vehicle charging stations. Bradner said that’s a use that could become more valuable to American municipalities in the future.

He added that having strong product support and consumer reliability from the company that sources the tech is important for implementing license plate recognition software. “The other thing, I think, is privacy. You know you’ve got a license plate on this street at this time, and you want to make sure this data is secure and not being used for other purposes.”

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