Beginning Oct. 28, the Hillsborough Street parking system will be changed to utilize a new pay-by-plate system, following complaints of parking spots being rarely available.

In addition to requiring users to enter their plate number instead of a spot number, rates on Hillsborough Street will increase by $0.50 and ending hours extended to 8 p.m.

According to Jeff Murison, president and CEO of the Hillsborough Street Community Service Corporation, the change was intended to improve efficiency on Hillsborough Street. Murison said one of the principle elements of parking management is the need to turn a space over that creates more access for people to park on the street.

“For one, it digitalizes electronically all the information so the meter readers, instead of marking your tires and coming back and seeing if you’re still there two hours later, all that information is electronic and they can just monitor it and see just what car is parked where and when,” Murison said. “When their time is expired, based on how much they’ve paid for. It improves efficiency.”

Murison said that the optimum vacancy rate on Hillsborough Street is 80% full and 20% vacant, but this year, parking sports were at 95% occupied, making it difficult for people to find spots at any given point in time.

“So, people weren’t able to find spots and they were very frustrated with the corridor from a parking perspective, so raising the rate encourages people to park and encourages people to use other transit options: Bus, bike, walk, scooter and those kinds of things, and it encourages them to turnover after,” Murison said.

Murison also said the hours of paid parking would be extended to 8 p.m. because, according to him, students would park on the street for hours, which created little turnover, saying that because students want to park near campus, it will take a lot of changes to make the parking environment on Hillsborough suitable for all.

“We do an annual survey every year of our stakeholders and how they feel about the street and the community, and every year parking is by far the number one issue that people say needs to be addressed and needs attention and is the biggest problem on our street,” Murison said. “You have to start somewhere. If we’re going to address parking, which is clearly a major issue, parking is a challenge at every university, community space in the country. It’s part of the fabric of a downtown space. You have to start somewhere, and the benefit here is that you have improved technology that manages and creates revenue to implement new solutions.”