Every plate in and out is read by a camera and the stay is timed, because after two hours we charge. One vehicle has an open stay of four years. The bay it is parked in reads occupied on a sensor that does not use a camera.
I am the operations manager of a superstore and the car park is in my remit, which means the enforcement contract is my headache.
How it works, because the detail matters to what follows.
Two cameras on the entrance and two on the exit read number plates. The system pairs an entry with an exit and gives you a stay. Over two hours without a purchase and you get a letter, and a letter means a contract, a code of practice and an appeals process, so the data has to stand up.
Separately, about sixty of our four hundred bays have a bay sensor in them, fitted in 2020 when we trialled a space counting system for the signs on the approach road. A sensor is a puck in the tarmac that reads the metal above it. It is not a camera and it does not know what a number plate is.
So there are two independent things measuring that car park: one that reads plates at the edges, and one that reads metal in sixty specific bays.
There is an open stay on the system that began on the eleventh of April 2021.
One thousand six hundred and something days. It is the oldest open record by four years, and the next oldest is eleven hours, which was a breakdown.
The plate is a valid format. It is a plate that the DVLA database, which our enforcement contractor can query for a keeper's address, returns no record for.
Not a stolen plate, not a cloned one as far as anybody can tell. No record.
So no letter has ever been sent, because there is nobody to send it to, and the contractor's system has flagged it as an unenforceable record since 2021 and has stopped caring.
Which bay, and how I know.
Bay 212, in the far corner by the trolley bay and the recycling bins, which is the worst bay in the car park and is generally empty.
It is one of the sixty with a sensor.
That sensor has read occupied continuously since the eleventh of April 2021.
What is in bay 212.
Nothing. It is an empty bay with a faded white line and a drain in the corner of it.
I have stood in it. I have had the trolley lads park a van in it and take the van out again, and the sensor reported the van arriving and leaving on top of whatever it thinks is already there, because these things report occupied or vacant and not how many.
What has been done about it.
The sensor. Dug out and replaced in 2022, because that was obviously the answer and it cost four hundred pounds.
The new one read vacant for about forty minutes, which is its calibration period, and then read occupied.
The system. The space counting trial was abandoned in 2023 for commercial reasons and the signs now use a simple count off the entrance and exit cameras, so bay 212's sensor reports into a system nobody looks at except me, because I kept the login.
The camera record. Our contractor ran a manual review in 2021 when I raised it, and what they came back with is the thing I would like explained.
They have the entry photograph. The system keeps a still of every plate read, and the still for that record exists and is in their portal.
It is a photograph of our entrance at 21:14 on a Sunday in April 2021, lit by our own lights, with the plate in the reader box and a vehicle shape behind it.
I have looked at that image on four occasions over four years, and what I can tell you about the vehicle is that it is a dark estate car and that the image is the same resolution and quality as every other entry still in that system, which is to say good enough to read a plate and not good enough to read a tax disc.
What we do about it now.
It sits in the data as an unenforceable open record and it is excluded from the average stay figures, which I had done in 2022 because a four year stay in the average makes the report meaningless.
Nobody at head office has ever asked. The enforcement contract is measured on letters sent and appeals lost, and this record has never generated either.
What I do.
The car park walk is part of the morning and it takes ten minutes and bay 212 is on the route.
The change is small and it is about the trolley lads rather than about me.
Bay 212 is next to the trolley bay, and it used to be where we put the spare trolley cages and where the lads would leave the tug while they had a cigarette.
There is a bollard there now. I put it in in 2023 on the grounds that the bay is awkward for customers and better used as overflow for the trolleys, which is the opposite of what the bollard does, and nobody has questioned it because nobody cares about the worst bay in a car park.
The reason is that on a Tuesday in March 2023 I was doing the walk and one of the lads was standing in 212 on his phone, and he moved out of the way when I came over, and he said, without me asking him anything, that he did not like that bay because the ground was always warm.
I have checked that with an infrared thermometer on six mornings. The tarmac in bay 212 reads between one and a half and two degrees above the bays either side of it, in all weathers, and tarmac holds the heat of the day and the sun, and that corner of our car park is in shade from nine in the morning.