Thursday, June 9, 2016

Smart Parking for Smart Cities

Published in https://issuu.com/urbanaworld/docs/urbana_jan_feb_2016_final.compresse


The ‘100 Smart Cities Mission’ of the Government of India identifies smart parking as one of the core infrastructure elements for a Smart City[1]. The increasing pace of motorization within Indian Cities in the last decade has led to an urgent need to address both on-street and off-street parking. A recent global study of parking in big cities across the world suggests that the average city driver spends an average of 18 to 20 minutes searching for parking[2], resulting in driver stress, wastage of fuel, increased emissions, congestion on city streets and decrease in productivity. The study by IBM points out that “drivers in Nairobi averaged 31.7 minutes in their longest search for a parking spot, and commuters in Bangalore, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Mexico City, Paris and Shenzhen all reported means significantly above the worldwide average. Seventeen percent of drivers in Milan and Beijing and 16 percent of drivers in Madrid and Shenzhen spent 31 to 40 minutes looking for parking”.
Parking problems are turning out to be ubiquitous and growing at an alarming rate in every major city in India, causing challenges for city administrations and traffic authorities and lack of technology in parking ecosystem keeps on elevating this problem on a daily basis. Absence of real-time parking information for drivers has emerged as key problem for approximately 30 million Indian commuters across major cities. As per a study done by Frost & Sullivan (2015), a commuter in Delhi spends an extra 80+ hours driving more than 150 miles more every year looking for parking spaces. This in turn has a cascading effect such as wasting more than a million gallons of fuel during peak hours, burning more CO2, spending around 250 hours more in traffic congestion every year.
Increasingly, Cities across the world are effectively adopting innovative strategies that promote ‘value for money’ by ‘doing more with less’ and addressing parking challenges by leveraging technological advancements. The Frost & Sullivan Study[3] suggests that ‘smart parking’ is going to be increasingly associated with various modes of travel and “involve multiple stakeholders from the automotive, telecommunication and infrastructure industries" 

Cities are providing information related to real-time status of every parking spot, helping drivers find a free one, pay directly from their phone and all of these through mobile apps. Given the increasingly high usage of mobile applications in India, smart parking solutions based on mobile app can emerge as a key solution for Indian Smart Cities as part of their larger goal to improve urban mobility and explore dependable revenue generation models.
·       Concept of sensor-based parking management
The sensor-based smart parking initiative employs a simple concept where individual sensors are placed in between the parking slot. Whenever a car gets parked in the parking slot (both on-street & off-street), it is detected by the sensor. The information from the sensors are relayed to wi-fi receivers, which in turn stores it in the server regarding the current place occupied by the car. This is same in the case when the car leaves the parking space.
The information relayed from each sensor is sent to a mobile phone app, which provides drivers with a real-time map of free spaces. The mobile app also allows a driver to reserve a parking spot in a convenient parking lot, based on their preferences, traffic conditions and availability of public transport. Subsequently based on the parking tariff, the payment of parking fees is facilitated through the mobile app, thereby reducing the need for cash payments.
As a result, this significantly cuts down the amount of time spent searching for parking spaces and, crucially, reduces environmental impacts resulting from congestion and emissions in urban areas.
The introduction of sensor-based smart parking systems has potential win-win scenarios for all stakeholders in the urban parking ecosystem within Indian Cities:
Citizens: The sensor-controlled parking management system provides citizens with statistical and real-time data to effortlessly locate the current parking space availability or availability at a certain time of day. The driver gets detailed information about occupied and free spaces available in the parking area through a mobile application and thereafter is able to book the desired parking slot by making a payment using the mobile app. The parking rates and standard policies for each location can be accessed by the driver through the mobile app.

City Administration: The principal benefit of a sensor-based smart parking initiative for city administration is provision of better parking management and its impact on traffic management and public transport management as a result of improved traffic flow, less congestion, and better mobility.  The City administration is expected to play the role of an enabler of infrastructure such as sensors and Wi-Fi equipment and also act as the key entity for deciding the governance and implementation of the infrastructure required for the sensor-based smart parking framework within its area. The privacy and confidentiality of public information and its usage is also regulated by city administration. The initiative empowers city administrators to track payment and overstay violations, get instant information on parking occupancy, revenue generation and provide optimum parking capacity at a lower investment than the other solutions presently available.
Service Providers: They are responsible for developing the software and technology architecture for provision of parking spaces. Service providers are also able to generate detailed descriptive reports and also forecast informative insights that aid in the development of future parking management strategies for city administrators.  Reliable application programming interfaces (APIs) need to be in place so as to offer services to consumers through a variety of mediums (web/ mobile phone apps).
·       Key Outcomes of a sensor-based smart parking management
The fundamental objective behind sensor-based smart parking is about augmenting service levels for citizens, thereby improving the urban environment, optimizing parking space usage, enhanced revenues through dynamic pricing and promotion of intermodal travel for citizens.

In conclusion :
Smart Parking is one key tool in mitigating the transportation issue by optimizing usage of the parking assets in a city. In the process, it makes the city more efficient and less polluting, as it reduces unnecessary movement of vehicles which are searching for parking and also reduces random parking that leads to roads being blocked which in turn reduces the average speed of vehicles. Any modern city that is desirous of transforming into a smart city, must adopt Smart Parking, as part of its overall transportation solution.



[1] 2014 Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, Smart City – Mission Statement & Guidelines
[2] 2011 IBM, Global Parking Survey of 20 Cities                                                                                                      
[3] 2015 Frost & Sullivan, Strategic Analysis of Smart Parking Market in Europe and North America

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