WHEELING — A new approach to monitoring downtown parking in the city of Wheeling will soon be introduced, with modern technology promising to help enhance commerce at local businesses in a way that antiquated parking meters cannot.

The city is preparing to outfit two newly purchased vehicles and one additional municipal vehicle with cameras, hardware and software that will allow parking enforcement personnel to keep track of parking violations.

Wheeling City Manager Robert Herron explained that the technology — commonly known as Electronic Tire Chalking or Digital Tire Chalking — will not only increase efficiency with enforcement, but will also allow free parking for certain periods of time before overtime violations warrant a ticket.

City officials for years have stressed that parking meters in areas such as the downtown are in place not for revenue but instead to create turnover — keeping parking spaces available for people visiting local businesses.

“The goal now is turnover,” Herron said. “Parking meters are very effective with turnover. Right now we have no meters in most of the downtown, and there are people parking for longer than two hours. We believe this is going to effectively deal with that.”

Herron noted that, currently, the only way to enforce overtime parking in areas without meters is to physically chalk tires, which is a long, tedious and inefficient process when enforcement personnel are on foot doing it manually.

With the new system, technology does all of this work very quickly.

“There will be cameras mounted on vehicles — we bought two, and we have one now that will be a spare,” Herron said. “There will be parking zones established where the majority of them will be two hours free parking. Some of them will be a little bit shorter depending on the type of business.”

Herron explained that parking enforcement personnel will drive the outfitted vehicle in the designated areas, such as the downtown, and the cameras will read each vehicle’s license plate and the location of at least one valve stem. They will register the location, time and date, and then will provide notifications when two hours have passed.

The technology will detect if a vehicle is parked in a two-hour parking zone or a 15-minute parking zone, Herron explained. The technology zeroes in on a vehicle’s valve stem location, which in essence is similar to chalking a tire to see if it is moved from that same location after time has expired.

“It will alert the parking enforcement personnel in the car when the two-hour time frames are up, or as the parking enforcement personnel drive by, it will alert them as well,” Herron said.