Kansas University is no longer selling parking permits in sticker form — and soon will be using cameras to scan license plates and emailing parking tickets instead of sticking them under the windshield wipers.

This semester, KU is switching to e-permits for on-campus parking.

Or as Danny Kaiser, KU’s associate director of parking and transit, prefers to say, “We’re not selling permits anymore, we’re selling permission.”

Kaiser said it’s hoped that the new electronic system will enable KU Parking to monitor lots more quickly and with fewer people. (No one is losing their job, he said, though KU Parking is not replacing a number of people who have retired.)

“We’ll be able to patrol the lots more frequently with this,” he said. “Our purpose is to protect the parking for the people who paid for it, and by increasing our enforcement times we’ll be able to protect it better and hopefully keep out the interlopers.”

The new e-permits go into effect Aug. 24, the first day of fall classes.

Here’s how the system will work, according to Kaiser:

• When purchasing parking permits for their chosen colored lots, KU community members will register their license plate numbers with KU Parking.

• License plate-reading cameras attached to either side of a KU Parking vehicle will scan license plates in a lot as the vehicle drives through — two rows of vehicles at once. If a license plate number is detected that is not registered as having a permit for that lot, a ticket will be generated.

This process will happen “all in real time,” Kaiser said.

• Cars with a KU permit but parked in the wrong lot will have a ticket sent to the email address they registered along with their license plate. Cars with no KU permit — and presumably no email address on file — will get a ticket in the mail.

Even though the technology will be at the ready, emailed and mailed tickets won’t start going out right away, however.

To ease into the new process and make sure things are going as planned, Kaiser said KU Parking will stick with printed windshield wiper tickets for now — which parking employees can still print out from their patrols. He said KU Parking will implement emailed and mailed tickets later, though a specific target date has not been set.

“We’re not going to roll this out all at once,” he said. “We’re taking it one step at a time; it’s a big jump.”

Kaiser said KU Parking has fielded several common — and good — questions from KU drivers.

One is, what about people who regularly drive different cars to work, like a husband and wife who trade cars?

Kaiser said multiple license plates can be registered for one parking permit, but you can’t have both on campus at the same time.

“And we would know,” he said. “That’s built into the software.”

Another question is, without stickers in the windshields, how will booth attendants know which cars to allow to drive onto Jayhawk Boulevard during the day and which to stop?

The booths will be equipped with license plate readers, too, that alert attendants whether they have permission to drive on campus or not, Kaiser said.

Kaiser said KU Parking has been discussing and planning for e-permits for a couple of years.

When it first rolls out this month, he said, everyone will need a chance to get used to it, so KU Parking plans to help ease the process by issuing more warnings before moving on to real tickets.