INTELLIGENT PARKING

The corollary of an urban society with lots of cars is the need for parking. This is particularly acute at hospitals, which attract three big groups of motorists; employees, patients and visitors. But how do you give priority to the first two without alienating the third?

For employees, it is easy. Since demand is relatively stable, both in terms of numbers and days worked, it is straightforward enough to give them their own separate area. For the latter it is more complicated, since demand can, and does, vary. Moreover, a patient needs to get to the hospital, and doesn't want to be put off by either lack of parking space or the cost of it; a visitor, on the other hand, chooses to go and is presumably more flexible about both.

The answer, as I discovered this morning when I took my mother-in-law to hospital to have a cataract operation, is a smart parking meter. Patients simply insert their health insurance card in the meter; the machine registers, via the hospital's in-house IT system, that he/she has an appointment on that day, and issues a free parking ticket. Visitors, on the other hand, have to insert their credit card and pay.

This admirably effective system requires, of course a) that everyone has a health insurance card, and b) that the hospital's IT system can be coupled up to the parking meter. Since those pre-requisites don't exist in the U.K., I fully expect the issue of patients' having to pay for parking to continue to be an irritation there.

Walter Blotscher