One of Maldon District Council’s fun features for children is their Splash Park on the Esplanade. The park is designed with different flumes and sprayers for children to cool down during hot summer days.
The children can use the Splash Park for an hour at a time. To access the park, they have to purchase a ticket from one of the two Metric Aura machines and then exchange it for a wrist band.
In the height of the summer holidays, both Aura machines issued on average 900 tickets per machine per day, seven days a week.
Recently chip and pin was introduced as a retrofit onto one of the machines and it has proved to be very successful with over 50% of all transaction being converted to credit card payment.
The machines were installed inside the Splash Park and are only 100 metres from the estuary so ‘loads of water everywhere.’ But the machines are fairing well, says Richard Heard, Maldon District Council’s Parking Services Manager.
Since the introduction of the machines earlier this year they have issued over 100,000 tickets and are going strong – ready to issue another 100,000.
