Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Drive-In Car Counters

This is topic Drive-In Car Counters in forum Ground Level at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Scott D. Neff (Member # 185) on 09-27-2010, 04:40 PM:

We've been testing out a variety of car counters that are available from SenSource and each type has their own drawbacks. Does anybody here have any insight into car counters and which is the most reliable?

All the drive-ins used to have the Eprad in-ground car counters but over time the mechanisms have all failed over the years. Part of me wonders how hard it would be to recreate the old style car counters... it can't be that difficult since it is truly mechanical parts from the 60's & 70's.

If anybody has insight or suggestions, please sound off.

Posted by Todd McCracken (Member # 4718) on 09-27-2010, 06:02 PM:

Gosh I wish I remembered the name of the counter but when I worked construction we used a system that had a rubber tube you would lay across the entrance/driveway and would count 1 for every 2 axles that crossed it.

Was really just a box and a tube.

Looked allot like this
http://www.parkingzone.com/product/DTTT2.html

http://cgi.ebay.com/DIAMOND-TRAFFIC-TALLY-2-COUNTER-PNEUMATIC-/270641247950?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3f0379b6ce

Best thing about it was the only thing that ever wore out was the tube and replacing that was a dollar or two.

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 09-28-2010, 02:52 PM:

The problem with a pneumatic or other above-ground counter is that it can be easily defeated by removing the tube or activating device from the roadway, allowing the sale of unrecorded vehicles.

Posted by Bill Enos (Member # 440) on 09-28-2010, 03:19 PM:

The driveway hose probably works more reliably than any of the fanciful electronic devices named and guess what? It can be checked with a glance. The hose is a couple bucks a foot, the pneumatic switch is around $5.00 and good for many thousands of vehicles not affected by emr, lightning, etc.

Posted by Tony Ratcliff (Member # 1196) on 09-28-2010, 08:20 PM:

What kind of device is it that the road departments use to count cars on the highway?
Would that work for a drive-in?

Posted by Louis Bornwasser (Member # 3063) on 09-28-2010, 09:14 PM:

The older Eprad systems used 2 treadles which are electrical switches. 2 pulses equal a count of one.

btw: run through it backwards, results in a NO COUNT.

I have a few new, old stock treadles left over. Louis

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 09-29-2010, 11:54 AM:

I have never seen these things. Is the purpose to compare "number of cars entering DI" with "number of carload admissions sold" to ensure that the cashier is not letting friends in for free or pocketing some of the boxoffice receipts?

In any case, what about those gas-station devices that go "ping" when a car drives over a tube? It seems like it would be easy enough to replace the bell with a mechanical counter. Or is that what is being discussed above?

Posted by Don Furr (Member # 1469) on 09-29-2010, 12:57 PM:

At the Fiesta Drive-In Mississippi) we had some sort of metal bar across both driveways that did the job of the hoses. Don't know who made it but I can't remember ever having any trouble with it's operation.

Posted by Barry Floyd (Member # 385) on 09-30-2010, 10:31 AM:

Since we charge a "per person" price instead of a carload price, having a truly 100% accurate car count isn't that big a deal for us. However that being said, we do use car count numbers to verify average attendance, use the numbers for "break outs" on concession sales per car, patrons per car, etc.

At our ticket booth, if a vehicle with 2 people show up, they are handed 3 tickets (2 admission tickets and 1 car count ticket). About 30 minutes after the first movies start, we have one of our parking attendants walk the field and physically count the cars with a hand held tally counter ("clicker"). The parking attendant counts each field, and then reports those numbers to either me or my wife. After the box office closes, the box office attendant brings her paperwork to the building, and we can compare ticket numbers vs. tally counts.

99% of the time both numbers match.

We got ours HERE

Posted by Scott D. Neff (Member # 185) on 10-01-2010, 01:53 PM:

The reason for car counters is to prevent cashiers from accepting your cash but never reporting it by selling a ticket. Because Drive-Ins are so rare these days people don't understand that they're supposed to receive a ticket just like they do at a regular theatre. In fact most people coming to our drive-ins (unless they're regulars) are more concerned with where they're supposed to park and what radio station they're supposed to tune into.

We too charge by the person, currently on a cash register. As far as the register is concerned we ring up by the number of people in the party. So if there are three of you in the car and you want to see a movie on screen #7, we have a button for "Screen #7 - 3 Adults". At the end of the night the difference between the opening and closing transaction total equals how many cars we sold. We will from time to time go out and count the fields but on a Saturday night it's next to impossible to count all the cars, especially without getting disoriented.

One of our managers recently went and did a count on a Saturday and found an extra 40 cars on the lot. Luckily it was at one of our smaller theatres so it didn't take him too long, but he had to do it twice to make sure his eyes didn't play tricks on him. We assume an average of two people per car, @ $6.75 a head, that's $540. When you have four cashiers selling tikets to all screens it's hard to narrow down who's responsible but if they knew we could compare their transaction count to the number of cars that have driven through their box office, this likely wouldn't happen (or at least happen less frequently). While this won't eliminate people from just ringing up two people in the car instead of three, at least if we can be certain of our car counts we can monitor that through Per Car averages.

What I'm finding is that all the modern technology is too finicky or is made for applications where they aren't trying to count down to the very last car. How many parking garages have you driven into with these gizmos that say there are 25 spaces left on the second floor for you to find out there are none? I doubt that the transportation authorities need their sensors to be 100% accurate, they just need to know there's a crapload of cars driving over them or not. Also, with the hoses, they're meant to be driven over in a straightforward manner. When you have these positioned at a box office where the car may need to make a hard right to turn onto a screen, or where our driveway is curved for dramatic 1960's effect, the air is never forced through the hose to trip the counter.

So this leads me back to the original treadles like Eprad and other companies made back in the day. Because we've more or less abandoned these thinking the new technology would work anything I might have had to examine is long since destroyed. If anybody knows (and it sounds like Louis you might) how to create and install these things, please let me know. Also, I keep hearing that these were completely reliable. Having only worked with them briefly on the periphery of my job, I never really noticed if they were. Does anybody have insight into whether these were reliable or if perhaps managers back in the day fudged the numbers to make my bosses think they were?

Posted by Jack Ondracek (Member # 1466) on 10-02-2010, 12:08 PM:

We use the RTS POS system. It's the only one I know of that will print ONE ticket for the entire car, though several cash registers can do the same thing. For me, this has always been a major priority at the boxoffice. Having one piece of paper tells the whole story and eliminates a lot of fussing around, excuses and associated grief when trying to verify how many people should be in a particular car. We also print information on the ticket, such as radio channel, parking policies and a couple of the most important "rules"... making the ticket a source of information for the customer... not just a receipt.

The other side of this is that we DO check tickets from time to time... and not always because we know someone was in the trunk. The boxoffice is aware of this, and knows that we would take a very dim view of finding out that a patron really did not get a ticket (one of the customers' favorite excuses, by the way).

The other fix to this is to put a family member in the boxoffice... preferably one of the owners. That fixes a lot of potential problems and causes very few.

Posted by David Kilderry (Member # 142) on 10-09-2010, 01:10 AM:

We, like Jack, have an electronic ticketing system (Venue Master). Our tickets have the radio station and the film(s) on it too. We also do spot checks and every customer must have a ticket.

We did have manual car thumpers/counters on the front wall of the ticket box. This was mainly to show when capacity was reached in the speaker only days. These days with FM it is less critical.

Scott, how many drive-ins left on the old Syufy circuit now?

Posted by Scott D. Neff (Member # 185) on 10-10-2010, 12:20 PM:

We have seven operating now... from one screen all the way up to nine.