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Operating a managed, busy parking lot can pose significant challenges, especially to a government organization that also owns some of the vehicles in the lot. The parking area has to be secure, with barrier-enforced entrances and exits. It also has to have an automated, efficient monitoring system that allows for accurate vehicle tracking as well as easy in-and-out access for drivers.
The Municipality of Pendik in Istanbul, Turkey, operates a highly trafficked parking area for its municipality-owned fleet of 1,000 vehicles. The lot has four gates, far away from each other. The cars move in and out of the lot four or five times each day. The municipality did not want to hire four parking lot attendants, yet funneling all the traffic through a single, congested gate was not an option.
Since some of the gates are dangerously close to a motorway, municipality officials did not want to distract its drivers by having them press buttons to open the barriers. They wanted a completely automated solution that would give the drivers better ease of use with an easy in and out.
“When we heard about the problems that the municipality was facing, we decided that RFID would be the best solution,” says Levent Yalcinkaya, STS Technology Technopark Director.
STS recommended RFID solutions from Alien Technology and developed a complete RFID vehicle tracking solution for the municipality’s parking lot and fleet of vehicles. Each gate has exit and entrance doors equipped with readers and circular antennas.
Each vehicle has an M tag, which is applied inside the windshield. The M tag is a highperformance tag that is ideal for plastic. The tags are encapsulated in a sticker that has the logo of the Pendik municipality.
STS built software based on Alien’s API, so the municipality administrators can record the vehicle movements. “The system records about 4,000 transactions to the database each day,” explains Yalcinkaya. On some gates, STS deploys one reader for the entrance and exit. On other gates, STS uses two separate readers, for a total of six Alien readers to monitor the lot traffic. Each reader can detect the vehicle tags from approximately five to six meters, he adds.
STS’s RFID solution for the municipality was able to overcome the challenges of monitoring the fleet. “The municipality before would have to open the barriers with the help of security people or by the driver’s action button. And the administrators were recording the vehicle movements manually,” says Yalcinkaya.
