Entrance and exit
One counting line per lane, behind the barrier where vehicles drive through rather than wait.
Counting vehicles in and out of a car park
Car park occupancy counting on the camera: counting lines at the entrance and the exit give you a running occupancy figure and a free space count for the sign. No licence plates are captured.
- Counting vehicles in a car park, by class
- Free space display: car park entrance sign fed by the camera
- Small car park counting without a server
Car park P2
37 free
of 180 spaces
Context
The situation
Company car parks, hotel garages, park-and-ride sites and small public car parks want one thing at the gate: how many spaces are free. A full guidance system with a sensor above every bay is far more than they need. Counting vehicles at the entrance and the exit gives the answer with one camera per gate — or one camera for both, if they are side by side.
Counting points
What gets counted and where
Vehicle classes
Cars, trucks, buses and two-wheelers counted separately; two-wheelers do not take a space by default.
Levels
In a multi-storey car park, ramps between levels can be counted so each level has its own figure.
Products
Which Vicodis products are involved
| Product | Role in a car park |
|---|---|
| Vicodis Parking | Vehicle classes, free spaces and capacity threshold — part of the Vicodis Vehicle licence |
| Full-screen view | Free space figure on a screen at the entrance |
| Vicodis Zone | Separate gates or several levels combined |
Purpose
What the data is used for
The free space figure goes to the sign at the gate, to a screen or to a website. The history shows how full the car park is by hour and weekday — useful for pricing decisions, shift planning and the question whether more spaces are needed.
- Sign at the gate: free spaces or “full”.
- Website: the live figure pushed to your web server.
- Planning: occupancy by hour, day and season.
On site
Installation notes for this environment
Gates are outdoors and often dark. Use an outdoor camera with infrared, place the line behind the barrier and keep queues out of the counting area. Because cars stay overnight, switch off the daily zero reset and correct the figure by hand when needed.
Vicodis counts occupancy at the gates. It does not detect single bays, does not guide drivers to a free space and never reads licence plates.
- Outdoor camera with infrared
- Line behind the barrier, not at it
- Daily zero reset off
- LTE router for remote car parks
FAQ
Questions from car park operators
01
How does the free space sign get its number?
Directly from the camera. A plain-text address returns the number of free spaces, which most LED signs and signage players can read, and a full-screen view shows it on any screen. For a website, the camera can push the figure to your web server every 30 seconds.
02
Is one camera enough for a small car park?
Often yes. If the entrance and the exit lane are side by side and both are in the camera’s view, one camera draws one line for arrivals and one for departures. Separate gates need a camera each, and Vicodis Zone adds them into one figure for the car park.
03
Are licence plates or drivers recorded?
No. The camera classifies vehicles as cars, trucks, buses, two-wheelers or other vehicles and counts them at the line. It never reads licence plates and stores no images. What remains are counts per class and time interval, which identify neither the vehicle nor its driver.
How many visitors does your entrance really have?
Tell us your camera model or your project — we check compatibility and come back with a concrete proposal.