In Hindsight, It's Obvious!

Toll Roads…

Remember when you had to stop every few miles to go through a booth, toss in a couple of quarters, or hand a few bills to an attendant before going on your merry way? How inefficient and absurd! That was before smartphones and ubiquitous internet—do you remember those days? I don’t. That was before vehicles became smart. Those were the days when you were probably still tuning into 102.1 FM to catch the latest Blink-182 song!

Today, the toll road experience is quite different, and it feels obvious. Now we have E-ZPass (Northeast), FasTrak (California), SunPass (Florida), etc., and all toll road payments have become automated. Your car is your wallet. You signed up once, received your little sticker for your windshield, and never thought about avoiding the toll road again to save a few bucks and minutes of your day. If you’re like me, you look back ten years and think, “Well, that was obviously inefficient! We should have thought of that…”

That’s why I feel so confident that we’re living through a similar transition in the parking industry. We’re still in that amusing era akin to the late ’90s, when cash and credit card toll booths were the main forms of highway payment, while a few bold states were starting to roll out seamless license plate capture or beaconed toll roads. Remember asking your mom for her E-ZPass before a long drive to the beach because you didn’t want to get stuck in the toll booths? That might have just been me. The parking industry is experiencing that same technological transition, yet we’re still acting like it’s the late ’90s. Ticket systems for entry and exit are still the primary form of access control and payment, but the modernization shift is here—we just have to hurry up. Surprisingly, in 2024, there are still people who believe the best way to drive in and out of parking locations is to grab a paper ticket, swipe a credit card, and receive a printed receipt. Who are these primitive folks, you may ask? Probably your landlord, and we’re here to help them modernize.

(I feel so lucky to be working at Metropolis in 2024.)

After a big technological breakthrough, the early adopters who took the first swing-and-misses can finally say, “See, I was right all along!” The first iterations of new technologies often miss the mark but land somewhere just on the fringe. Later, when the real breakthrough happens, the original naysayers become believers because the technology stops being a theoretical concept and becomes a rational proof point of exceptionalism. What I mean by that convoluted statement is simply this: they experience the benefits of the technology and become adopters.

License plate recognition (LPR) technology came out decades ago, but it was terribly flawed. With advances in computer vision and large language models that actively learn and recognize imagery from endless data sets, camera vision has become extraordinarily more powerful when it comes to reading vehicles and license plates. One major difference between early LPR solutions and today’s is that the software capturing imagery and video can learn and get smarter based on patterns and its understanding of the visual universe. This technological breakthrough allows the masses to fully grasp why we can do away with the proverbial ‘toll booth.’ This new dynamic is why Waymo and self-driving vehicles are getting better and smarter with each trip. You wouldn’t expect to live in a world where a self-driving vehicle has to stop at a ticketing machine to park or access a garage, would you?

We are reaching the tipping point for the parking industry, and it’s exciting, fun, and special to be living through this transitionary period. It’s an honor to be on the team driving that change. I wonder if this is how they felt at E-ZPass in the mid-’90s?!

Before a breakthrough, you don’t question a broken system. After an innovation scales, you question why it wasn’t so obvious in the past! When you’re on the other end of change, it feels so clear that you don’t even think about what came before.

I don’t remember when I didn’t have Apple Pay on my phone.

I don’t remember when I couldn’t send a Venmo payment electronically.

I don’t remember the days when you couldn’t order food on your phone.

Will you remember when you couldn’t just drive in and out to park?