Big Brother, here for your convenience

[jducoeur]

So we got home from Colorado this evening, arrived at Logan Airport, and went over to the parking lot. I pulled out my garage ticket, stuck it into the payment machine (they now ask you to pre-pay before going to your car), stuck in my credit card to pay, and got my receipt. Helpfully, the receipt told me which row my car was parked in, in case I had forgotten.

How the blithering heck did it know where my car was parked?

I mean, this was an anonymously-taken ticket from a week ago; they *might* infer which level I might be parked in (since it was the one they were encouraging at the time), but I parked in one of a number of open rows. Yes, I did scribble the location on my ticket, but I'd be damned impressed at any OCR software that can figure out my handwriting.

My best guess (and I'm open to simpler explanations) is that they're going through Long-Term Parking each night, recording the license plate numbers of all of the cars parked there, looking them up, and cross-referencing them with the credit card submitted for payment. (Or that they are photographing your license plate as you take your ticket when entering, and doing the cross-reference that way.) That's a non-trivial piece of engineering, but entirely feasible. But man -- that's kind of creepy, and it wouldn't even have occurred to me that they were doing it if it wasn't for that helpful line on the receipt...

Comments

How it works

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

I read an article about it in the Globe a couple of years ago, when they started doing it.

They take a picture of your license plate when you enter the garage, so it's associated with your ticket. And every night, they drive around and check the plates in all the spaces that might be newly-filled — that is, parking spaces that were previously empty, or whose previous occupant left in the past day.

Re: How it works

[jducoeur]

Okay, about what I'd figured, plus some smart software to cut down on the redundant effort. Having noticed that they've gotten pretty aggressive about chaining off some levels and steering people to others, I wonder if they're using that to cut down on the labor involved. (If there's no one new in a level, you don't need to scan it...)

Re: How it works

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

You could hope, charitably, that the chaining off is for your benefit, as well as theirs. This system means they know when spaces open up, so for any level whose entrance is chained off, they know how many empty spaces are on it at any time. This could let them open and close levels to fill in the ones with holes and not force you to drive around ones with no room...

Re: How it works

[jducoeur]

Sure, but it appeared (anecdotally) that they're more aggressive about the chaining than is strictly necessary. That is, it looked to me like some of the nominally "full" levels had a fair number of open spaces in them. From a traffic-management POV, that makes sense in several ways, cycling the lots so that you tend to fill up one level while draining others.

(Of course, I may be imputing a plan where there isn't one: they might just not get around to taking down the "Full" sign quickly. But it would make some sense to rotate levels a bit like this...)