Compliance Display Map

One of the key objectives of the 2012 bid was to make the London Olympics the first games to be primarily accessible via public transport.  T to promote this, ticket holders for the London Games were issued with a free Travelcard to encourage them to use the capitals extensive tube, rail and bus network rather than drive to the venues.  Accordingly vehicle access and parking in and around the roads at Olympic events was strictly controlled.

This meant that the LOCOG (The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) Transport team faced the daunting challenge of not only having to issue permits to the fleet of official ‘Games Vehicles’ but also issue parking permits to the residents and businesses around the Olympic venues spread across the capital.

Over 2 million applications for Vehicle Parking Permits were received from residents, their visitors and businesses via the web, IVR phone system or by post.  These requests were validated by checking that the requestors post codes fell within a controlled zone.  To speed up the process and due to very short implementation timescales, and the need to balance a tight budget, nearly all of the permits were issued as ‘virtual’ permits with the details stored in a central database.  This meant a mobile ANPR based enforcement solution would be required to identify whether parked vehicles held a valid permit or not.

LOCOG turned to TES who provided eco-friendly Generation 4 vehicles equipped with CCTV and ANPR to enforce the scheme.  Controlled Parking Zones were pre-configured and downloaded into the vehicles database.  TES ‘patent pending’ web based Compliance Display Map was used to track TES CCTV vehicles and Civil Enforcement Officers (CEO’s) by GPS.  Throughout the 2012 games TES vehicles were used in “Spotter Mode” to patrol the specially created Olympic controlled parking zones and identify potentially non-compliant vehicles.  This was conducted by reading the number plates of parked vehicles within a zone using ANPR and instantly checking their permit status in real time by linking to the virtual permit system database over the 3G network.

Any potential contraventions were automatically sent on to Compliance Display Map by the TES CCTV vehicles. Compliance Display Map then identified the nearest CEO to the potential contravention and instantly forwarded a map, the street and location of the vehicle in potential contravention along with an image of the vehicle in question, to the CEO’s hand held computer for action.

An added advantage was that because Compliance Display Map is a web based system and can be accessed using a standard web browser, no specialised software or hardware was required in order to install the system at the Parking Control Office in Harlow, which allowed for rapid deployment.  The entire 24-hour a day enforcement operation was controlled from Harlow by an enforcement manager who was responsible for the deployment and monitoring of the fleet of mobile CCTV / ANPR vehicles using TES’s Compliance Display Map.

LOCOG Transports decision to use Virtual Permits enforced using a TES Mobile ANPR solution with Compliance Display Map enabling the enforcement team to keep London’s extremely busy road network open to Olympic traffic.  It also minimised disruption to the millions of people living around the Olympic venues, with the whole scheme deployed and operational in a very short space of time.

During the Games, TES vehicles covered 22,947 miles and processed 242,621 vehicles across the 4 London Boroughs that were mainly affected by the temporary parking controls.  This would not have been possible using a traditional paper based permit and manual enforcement system.

Furthermore LOCOG Transport achieved a saving in excess of 55% on the parking element of their Local Area Traffic Management and Parking Plan budget for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

In recognition of the success of LOCOG’s Transports Virtual Permit Scheme, enforced by the TES Generation 4 Vehicles and Compliance Display Map, they won the “Parking Partnership of the Year Award” at the 2013 British Parking Awards.

CCTV Control Room

TES Vehicles