RingGo Proves the Power of Paperless Parking

Councils, rail operators and other car park providers across the UK are ditching smartcard and scratchcard parking schemes in favour of streamlined, paperless RingGo.

* North Devon's smart card parking scheme has ceased and the Council has asked remaining users to claim any refunds before the end of October, when the smart card credit machine will be removed. The Council has nominated RingGo, introduced in May this year, as the replacement for the scheme.

* Trafford Council has replaced its match day permit scheme with RingGo, which occurred in time for the start of the new football season.

* In a local authority first, Bournemouth Council has just launched monthly RingGo parking payment as an option, encouraging regular users to purchase longer term parking by offering a substantial discount over the daily rate.

* In the last few days, RingGo signs have been erected around Richmond Council in areas where vouchers have been the sole method of payment. The aim is to provide customers with access to the more modern method of payment which has proven popular elsewhere in the Borough. RingGo has the added advantage that it provides access to discounted tariffs for vehicles with low CO2 emissions - something that isn't possible with voucher schemes.

* At the start of this month, RingGo launched a new online payment portal for First Capital Connect, offering customers a one stop shop for purchasing monthly, quarterly and annual parking season tickets, as well as reserved parking bays. Scratchcards for daily and weekly parking are available on the site, but take up has been low.

Ian McLaren of NCP Car Parks, which manages the car parks on behalf of First Capital Connect, says of the new service "There are two key messages from this launch. Firstly, that regular motorists benefit from reduced prices if they purchase long term parking online; and secondly, that digital parking, in the form of RingGo, is a quick and easy alternative to purchasing physical scratchcards."

RingGo's Technical Director Joanna Miller adds "The costs of supporting, maintaining and distributing physical parking tokens -smart cards, scratchcards, paper permits or indeed pay and display tickets - are substantial. Moving sales to digital payments reduces the costs and hassle to operators, especially when all the separate schemes are linked together under a single enforcement system, as increasingly happens with RingGo.

"Pooling data from physical payments and tokens is also difficult, so operators tend to get fairly sporadic or incomplete analyses of payments made this way. In contrast, reports from digital parking payments are much easier to collate, so for instance, RingGo offers graphs and reports of who has bought what, when. That type of automated data reporting simply isn't possible with physical payments.

"The message from all this is clear - that car park operators are increasingly aware that RingGo fits their needs, as well as the needs of their motorists."