In a move that will transform the parking experience in China's capital, Beijing announced a pilot program in which all 4,086 curbside electronic meters will go online across the city by the end of this month.

Electronic meters on a street in Tongzhou District, Beijing. [Photo credit: VCG]

It's not the first time that Beijing's traffic authorities have tried to modernize its parking system. In 1999, parking meters were installed in the city in the hope that car owners would adopt the habit of paying parking fees using a meter.

Things didn't go to plan, however, as most Chinese car owners took parking spaces near their homes for granted and all but ignored the meters. It fell on human parking attendants to make sure that drivers paid their parking fees, defeating the whole purpose of having parking meters in the first place.

Now, almost two decades later, will things be the same?

The biggest factor that emboldened drivers to ignore parking meters is that they could do so without any consequences. With the new smart parking system, a car's information will be recorded as it enters and leaves a parking space. A car owner's violations of parking regulations will be reflected in social credit platforms that set out to paint an individual's trustworthiness picture.

While in the past drivers could escape parking fees by speeding out of the car park when the parking attendant was looking the other way, with the new system, such behavior could have consequences as serious as denial of loans from a bank in the future.

Discouraging parking without paying is only a part of what the new system is capable of. The greatest appeal of the new parking approach lies in one word: smartphones.

Tapping into people's newly ingrained reliance on smartphones, Beijing Traffic, the official app of the city's traffic authorities, enables a driver to find an empty electronically monitored parking space on a map and pay parking fees with their phones.

For those who are yet to install the app, they can ask for the help of a parking attendant, who carries a POS terminal for fee collection. For some parking spaces, there are even solar-powered self-service fee collectors equipped with touch screens.

The adaptation of smart parking technology, however, is not without its downsides. Bearing the brunt of this new development are parking attendants in the city. According to the city's traffic authorities, as electronic meters become more prevalent, parking attendants will drop in number, their responsibility shifting from clocking and fee collection to checking and maintaining the new meters.

Despite the convenience brought about by app-based parking, many drivers avoid electronic meters because unlike with a human parking attendant, there is no room for frequent-parking discounts, something common at parking spaces near office buildings.

"I needed pay 40 yuan (about US$6.1) a day for parking near my workplace," said Dai, whose company is on a street where electronic meters are in trial operation."After these smart meters were installed, everything is done by the book and I have to pay the full daily parking amount, which is nearly four times what I used to pay. It's even more expensive than taking a taxi to work."

Dai's gripe with strict computers resonates among many white-collar workers in a city playing catch-up with the growth of motor vehicles. Nearly a quarter of the city's motor vehicles – 1.3 million out of 5.7 million – regularly struggle to find parking places, People's Daily reported.

For those lucky enough to find a parking space near where they work, regular discounts on the high parking fees, which are intended to discourage car use, are hard to live without.

The benefits for parking to go smart, however, outweigh those concerns. An efficient, effective and hassle-free parking system will not only make parking easier and optimise parking resources, it will also further foster personal integrity through making drivers think twice about shirking their parking fees.

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