Smart parking and kerb management is the use of cameras and software to charge for parking without a ticket or barrier, and to price the kerb of a city street for parking, loading and pick-ups. The kerb is the edge of the road where vehicles stop.
At a car park, a camera reads the vehicle's number plate as it enters and again as it leaves. This is automatic number plate recognition. The software works out how long the car stayed and charges the amount to the driver's account, or sends a payment link through a payment gateway. There is nothing to take, nothing to lose and no barrier to wait at.
These systems are used mainly in the United States and Europe, so the example here is American, in dollars. For example, consider a car park beside a sports stadium in Austin, Texas. You drive in at 1:05 pm and the camera reads your plate. You leave at 3:20 pm. The system calculates 2 hours 15 minutes, charges $18 to the card linked to your plate, and you drive out without stopping.
Cities use the same idea on the street. The kerb can be priced by the hour and by demand, with higher rates at busy times. This is dynamic pricing. It decides who can park, who can load goods and who can stop to pick up a passenger. Video analytics can count vehicles and spot those stopping where they should not. Without such a price, a busy street fills up with cars that stay all day, and delivery vans and cabs have nowhere to stop.
The large companies in this field work mainly in the USA, where their systems run across thousands of car parks, and in Europe. In India, ticketless parking is newer. It is found at some malls, airports and city-run parking lots, which often use a FASTag, the tag on the windscreen that is used at toll plazas.
The same plate-reading idea is used on toll roads. See electronic tolling. The difference is that parking charges for time, and tolls charge for distance or passage.