RingGo in UK can be a model for Ispark in Turkey ?

The RingGo, cashless parking service provided by Cobalt Telephone Technologies, lets British society use the car parks without any cash, credit cards or PayPass.

The system is quite easy to use. When you park your car in those locations (more than thousand), you check for the RingGo sign as you can see below.

After this step, it’s up to you. If you already registered in the system, you only have to confirm your location, your payment card security code and the length of time you stay. If you haven’t registered yet, you have to deal with a longer procedure (like the colour of the car, the plate number, etc.) So for sure, registering your info before is better I think. Because the strong feature of RingGo is that it works on a pay as you go basis. Another topic, the tariffs, depend on the car park you use. In some of them, you can find promotions even cheaper than paying with cash, even free periods at the weekend.

The system is not so hard to understand. You can find the press releases here, references for RingGo.

Now let’s think a similar solution for car parks in Turkey, mainly in Istanbul. In Istanbul, car parking has been managed by Ispark, a subsidiary of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. In 3 years since Ispark was established, they have earned huge amounts of money by short and long term parking in local places. The problem is, the company has a serious problem about labour costs. They have thousands of parttime and seasonal employees. Ispark has a rotation programme in which the employees change their locations periodically.

On the other hand we also know that some important tech projects are driven. Intelligent Transportation System – Otomation project is one of them based on wireless, mobile and NFC technologies. They call the project as “mobile park”. The project hasn’t been runned yet, however you can find some info here, unfortunately only in Turkish.

Because Ispark is a governmental association, they don’t announce the progress about technology projects. RingGo model can be an innovative solution for car parks and car houses of Ispark, whereas it’s not worth implementing it on the street parkings. Some more, I ll be searching for the mobile payment opportunities in car parking. It seems that Nordic countries seem interesting to be analysed.