The frustration of searching for coins in your pocket to pay for parking in Hammersmith & Fulham is set to be a thing of the past.
To make life easier for residents and visiting shoppers, cashless parking is coming to H&F as the council considers adopting new measures, following two successful trials.
For the past nine months, the council has been conducting a trial of a phone payment system in the controlled parking zone around Olympia, during which two-thirds of all parking payments were made by phone. A separate trial tested payments on parking machines using cards.
A report will be presented to H&F Council’s Cabinet when it meets at Hammersmith Town Hall on 12 October that will propose making the scheme borough-wide. Update 22 October 2015: This report was approved.
“We are determined to make it easier for H&F residents and their visitors to park in the borough and avoid accidentally overstaying or being caught without coins. Residents have been telling us they wanted to be able to pay for parking by phone and this trial has proved it works well and is popular,” said Cllr Wesley Harcourt, H&F Council’s Cabinet Member for Environment, Transport and Residents’ Services.
“Fewer and fewer residents carry cash these days and many of our ticket machines are 20 years old and prone to vandalism and theft, which only further inconveniences residents. Cashless parking would bring us in line with modern requirements and could also provide long-term savings that can be invested in improving our roads.”
If approved by the Cabinet, the new payment system will be rolled out across the borough on a zone-by-zone basis.
The phone payment service offers residents and shoppers several different methods to pay for their parking session including, sending a text to an automated service, using a smartphone app, or through an automated voice service.
As part of the proposal the existing ticket machines could also be upgraded to accept payment by card. Local businesses will be consulted on whether they would prefer to see some machines accept cash as well as card.
If approved by the cabinet, a tender will be put out for the service, with the first zone expected to start operating by July 2016.
