What is Open-Market Cashless Parking? 

Open-Market cashless parking is a form of digital parking where local authorities or private operators open up the market and provide several phone parking solutions across one area.  This enhances choice for motorists, and increases competition, helping improve solutions in the marketplace.

Why move to an Open-Market?

There are several reasons why local authorities might consider moving to Open-Market provision: 

• Open-Market parking offers wider choice for motorists.  If someone already has a favourite app, they can use that service wherever they park.
• It can also drive up digital usage – a particular benefit when covid is a recurrning theme and people are looking to reduce the number of surfaces they touch.
• Shifting payments away from machines and onto mobile phones reduces costs to Councils.  Everything from cash collections, processing and banking, to vandalism and fraud is reduced.
• Open-Market offerings will also, over time, cut the internal costs of repeated procurement exercises.  Once tender processes for the market are complete, there is no need to carry out further procurement every few years.
• Finally, an Open-Market encourages innovation and development of new services, as well as providing enhanced data.

Is Open-Market a new type of offering? 

Open-Market parking is extremely common across Europe and has been used in many countries for over a decade.  The UK, however, developed cashless parking via an alternative, tender model, where local authorities carry out regular procurement and a single service is offered in each area.  

Within the UK, several local authorities have now started rolling out or investigating multivendor or Open-Market models.  Cambridgeshire Council was the first to offer multiple services, in April 2019, and this has been followed by BCP Council which rolled out in May this year, and Manchester City Council in late-September. Oxfordshire County Council will also be going live soon.  

In Cambridgeshire and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, three solutions are offered.  Manchester is operating with four.  

How would a Council or Private Operator change to Open-Market? 

There are several ways of implementing Open-Market cashless parking, from integrated hubs, which support the widest possible parking, tariff, enforcement, environmental, and business intelligence solutions, to a simple multi-way enforcement integration.  Which option is best, depends on local circumstances, the level of sophistication desired, and how quickly you want to get up and running.  

Want to learn more? 

This page offers only a brief overview of Open-Market cashless parking and the benefits it brings.  If you want to find out more and discuss how it could potentially work in your area, please contact us today by speaking to your RingGo Account Manager or emailing Open-Market@RingGo.co.uk