Newcastle City Council has announced an upgrade to pay-and-display machines at its two busiest car parks to create a more convenient parking experience for residents and visitors.
Work to replace 34 old machines at Eldon Square and Eldon Gardens with 14 state-of-the-art Flowbird S5 terminals should be completed by the end September. The revamp will also enable the council’s check-in, check-out scheme to be rolled out to 10 new car parks by the end of this year.
Users of the two busiest car parks – which generated £2m in combined revenue annually prior to the impact of Covid-19 – will benefit from using the new machines, which feature the latest touchscreen technology that is faster than previous machines. In 2019, the parking machines at Eldon Square and Eldon Gardens dealt with 367,000 coin and card transactions and 204,000 remote payments by phone.
At both car parks, the new Flowbird machines will continue to only charge users up to the exact minute they are parking. Under the check-in, check-out system, the parking session starts once the user enters their details into the payment terminal with their bank card. The session then stops when the user returns to the car and check-outs using the same card.
What’s more, the council is able to run the same service but can save money as fewer machines are needed. This is because they are now located at the pedestrian exit points and are easier to find – saving users time trying to locate the old machines across various places on the car park levels. This improvement follows work between Flowbird and Imperial to ensure coin and card entries at the ticket machines are transferred onto the civil enforcement’s officers handheld device.
Russell Nelson, service development lead for parking services at Newcastle City Council, said: “The new pay-and-display machines mean users can conveniently park in Newcastle and get charged only for the time they are parked, not by arbitrary intervals. When residents and visitors park, they can be sure that they won’t be charged a minute longer than necessary for their visit.”
Improvements to pay and display facilities across Newcastle will mean that over a million car park users will be able to use card payments alongside cash at the ticket machines.
