About shared permits in AutoVu™ Free-Flow

If your AutoVu™ Free-Flow system is configured to allow shared parking permits, then the same parking permit can be associated with multiple vehicles. Shared permits are generally used if the permit holder owns more than one vehicle, or for drivers who carpool.

Shared permits apply to one vehicle at a time. For example, if all four carpool members who share a permit decide to drive their own vehicles on a certain day, only the first vehicle entering the parking zone would be allowed to park using the permit. The other three vehicles would generate shared permit hits if they enter the parking zone while the first vehicle is parked.

Using Pay-by-Plate Sync

Consider the following when configuring shared permits:

• To use shared permits, the permits must come from a third-party parking permit provider using the Pay-by-Plate Sync plugin. You can define static permits for vehicles in Security Center, however these permits cannot be shared between vehicles.
• To use this feature, the Pay-by-Plate Sync permit provider must support shared permits.
• Vehicles are considered to share a permit if they have the same permit ID. For this reason, ensure that all permits have a unique permit ID. If two permits share the same permit ID when this feature is enabled, they can generate shared permit hits.

How shared permits work

1. When a vehicle enters a parking zone, the system starts a new parking session for the vehicle and validates the parking permit associated with the license plate.
   NOTE: If the Sharp camera misreads certain characters of the vehicle's license plate, the system can still associate the vehicle's license plate to the parking permit. The system does this using an LPR matcher technique that only requires five common characters and four contiguous characters.
2. The system compares the permit ID with vehicles that are already in the parking zone.
   • If no other license plates share the same permit ID, the parking session's paid time stage begins.
   • If another license plate does share the same permit ID, then the parking session goes into violation.
   • If the license plate does not have a permit, then the parking session's convenience time starts.
   • If the system cannot communicate with the Pay-by-Plate Sync permit provider to validate the permit, the parking session's convenience time starts. The system attempts to validate the permit again at the end of the vehicle's parking session.