Three technologies, three cost structures, three failure modes. Most sites need two of them — here's how to pick which.
There is no single best access method. There is a correct combination for your traffic mix, and getting it wrong shows up as queues at peak or revenue you cannot account for.
Tickets: universal, slow, leaky
A paper ticket works for any vehicle that has never visited before, which is its entire advantage. The costs are a dispenser that jams, consumables, roughly eight to twelve seconds of dwell per vehicle, and a cash-handling process that is difficult to reconcile. For pure short-stay visitor traffic it remains a reasonable fallback. As a primary method for regular users it is indefensible.
RFID and FASTag: fast, but only for known vehicles
A long-range tag read completes before the driver has slowed, giving effectively zero dwell. That makes it the correct choice for any population you can enrol in advance — employees, residents, tenants, staff. The constraint is exactly that: someone must issue and manage the tag, and a vehicle without one falls through to another method.
FASTag is worth calling out separately because the tag is already on the windscreen. You are not issuing hardware, you are reading something the driver already has, which removes the administrative burden that kills most RFID rollouts.
ANPR: no enrolment, no hardware, some failure rate
ANPR reads the plate itself, so it works for vehicles you have never seen and requires nothing from the driver. It underpins stay-duration billing, whitelisting, and the audit trail that resolves damage disputes. Its honest weakness is that recognition is probabilistic — damaged, obscured, non-standard and handwritten plates all reduce accuracy, and Indian plate variance is considerably wider than the markets most imported systems were trained on.
The practical answer: layer them
Nearly every well-designed site runs two methods. RFID or FASTag on the regular population for zero-dwell entry, ANPR across all lanes for logging, billing and audit, and tickets retained only as the fallback when a plate genuinely cannot be read.
Design for what happens when the primary method fails, because it will. A lane that stops is worse than a lane that degrades.
The layering matters more than the individual accuracy figure any vendor quotes you. A 98% read rate sounds excellent until you work out that on 5,000 vehicles a day it means 100 stopped cars — unless there is a fallback that clears them without a marshal walking over.