Students will no longer be issued plastic permits when they register for fall parking thanks to a DOTS decision to implement license-plate scanners that verify whether cars are parked in their assigned lots.
Under the new Campus License Plate Recognition system, students will only register their car — entering its year, make, model and license-plate number into a Department of Transportation Services database. Cameras mounted to parking-enforcement vehicles will scan parked cars’ license plates and match them against GPS coordinates to see if they are legally parked.
If a car is not parked in the correct lot, the GPS system will beep and that car will get a ticket, DOTS officials said.
The cameras work “like a supermarket scanner” to read license plates, DOTS Director David Allen said, adding that eliminating the plastic tags will save the department an estimated $60,000 a year and will keep 50,000 pieces of plastic from being dumped into a landfill.
Students can register up to two cars at a time per permit and can change either of those cars in the database as needed, calling a 24-hour hotline to temporarily add a car in an emergency. Still, only one car can park on the campus at a time; if two cars registered to the same permit were to park on the campus at the same time, the permit holder would risk a $300 fine.
Several students who park on the campus said they had little objection to the change.
“I don’t think it makes that much of a difference,” said Esther Lee, a junior public health major.
Junior biology-psychology major Nicodeme Wanko, however, said he appreciated the new system’s flexibility of allowing multiple cars per permit, because it allows students to drive a different car if they are unable to drive the car they have primarily registered for any reason.
According to DOTS Assistant to the Director Beverly Malone, the money DOTS saves will be used for various projects throughout the university that would have otherwise caused an increase in the price of parking permits this fall. Parking rates remain unchanged at $217 a year for commuters and $419 for on-campus students.
The loss of the hanging parking tag means a change for university police officers, who wave cars with permits through the university’s nighttime security checkpoints without recording their license-plate numbers and requiring identification from drivers. As a replacement, DOTS will offer student permit-holders a small sticker with an “M” that they can place on the lower driver-side windshield, Allen said.
Only students will be using the license-plate registration system this fall, but Allen said he hopes to transition faculty and staff away from plastic permits as well in the near future, in favor of the system the DOTS website bills as “the future of parking.”
“We’ll be the first in the country … to have this kind of technology,” Allen said.
Undergraduate fall-parking registration opened yesterday at www.transportation.umd.edu.
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