Council staff are assuring customers the change-over to a paperless parking system during April will not adversely affect customers.

From April 3, customers will be asked to enter their registration plate number when paying at the new parking machines.

The machines will send that information to Tauranga City Council, enabling parking officers to check each vehicle's parking status according to its registration plate. No ticket will be issued by the machine for display.

City council staff say the city's system does not connect with the Ministry of Transport's computers. They cannot tell if the vehicle's warrant of fitness and registration are current.

All the standard payment options remain. Customers can still pay with cash, it's just that the machine no longer give a ticket to display.

That's what's changing. If you've paid and entered your registration number, it'll be in our system.

E receipts are available here.

Shifting to the paperless system will save people the hassle of returning to their vehicle to display a ticket, says city council transportation manager Martin Parkes.

'You will be able to pay and walk away without going back to the car. You will need to know your licence plate number or have it written down. Parking officers will be on hand for the first few weeks to help people get used to the new system.”

The change is happening because the banking industry requires the council to upgrade the credit card function on all parking machines by June this year.

'We're taking the opportunity to future-proof the machines at the same time.”

It will take about a month to change over all the machines to paperless, starting April 3. The outer machine shells will remain, with the internal units being swapped for the pay-by-plate consoles. The total number of parking machines will reduce from 153 to 110.

'People won't have to return to their cars to display tickets, so we can increase the distance between each on-street parking machine,'” says Martin.

"The paperless system will also save the council a lot of maintenance. Most maintenance issues are caused by paper jams in the machines."

Bylaws and Parking team leader, Stuart Goodman says a parking payment app introduced last year has already demonstrated that people can adjust to paying for parking without displaying a ticket.

'PayMyPark is a handy app that lets you manage your parking remotely,” says Stuart. 'More people are using PayMyPark each month. Two hundred new users have signed up since January.

'It can be a bit unsettling the first time you walk away from your car having paid without displaying a ticket. But people get used to it pretty quickly and seem to prefer it.

'Building on the success of PayMyPark, we're looking forward to the whole system going paperless. It will be more efficient for our records and enable us to verify customer queries quickly and accurately.”

PayMyPark is free to download from the Google Play Store and the App Store.