By Chelsea Webster
Parking is an easy first step for a municipality to take towards becoming a smart city because the technology already exists, and it can be tested and proven with minimal resources.
Key points
- A Smart City is defined by sensors that collect information and relay it to a hub, which recommends actions based on data analysis. Smart parking is applying this concept to parking.
- Citizen and government engagement and interaction is critical to the success and long term viability of the smart city concepts.
- Smart parking is a subset of the smart city concept that’s easily implemented; pros and cons exist, however the net impact is positive.
- Many other technologies (like autonomous vehicles) are impacting the adoption of smart parking and often creating more questions than answers.
Action: Three actionable suggestions can be found at the end of the article if you are interested in implementing smart parking in your municipality.
What is a Smart City?
The term “Smart City” has been making the rounds lately, and I’d venture a guess you’ve heard it once or twice by now (or perhaps you live and work outside the realm of this concept, which is fine too). But for everyone who has heard it, as much as for those who haven’t, what does it actually mean? For all the hype, it still isn’t listed on Dictionary.com or Merriam-Webster. A smart city is a broad concept, with no precedent, and as of yet, there aren’t set standards as to what defines a city as smart. Oh. Now what?
There are a lot of working pieces involved in the smart city concept, but let’s break it down into two key components: technology (physical and virtual requirements) and data (collection and application).
1. Technology
This is the network of sensors, cameras, and other devices that get built into the…
In areas where winter weather affects the operation of a parking structure, removal of snow and ice is necessary, if not paramount, for functional performance, the public’s safety, and the long-term durability of the structure. Snow and ice removal can be difficult depending on the size, timing, and type of storm, and also the area to be maintained. For these reasons, knowing with what and how to remove snow and ice can greatly affect the operation of the structure. The basic parameters for snow and ice removal include planning, proper equipment, chemical deicers, written procedures, and how-to instruction for snow removal personnel.
Planning
When removing snow and ice, planning plays an important role for a successful operation. Basic planning and specifications for snow removal begins during the initial design phase of the parking structure. The owner, architect, engineer, contractor, and precast/prestress concrete manufacturer must all be involved in determining how snow and ice will be removed. Operations such as removal of snow and ice from the deck surface, storage of snow and ice, and the use of certain types of equipment can cause major functional and performance problems to the structure if not properly addressed during the initial design phase.
When an architect or engineer begins considering the location and layout of a parking structure, snow and ice removal operations should be based on local climate conditions. Anticipated maximum snow fall and frequency will influence planning strategies. Once parameters for snow and ice removal have been established, features for storage or removal must be designed into the structure. Removal of snow is typically handled by moving the snow to a snow chute or snow melting equipment, or by moving to and through a gate opening in exterior spandrels.
Storage of snow requires strict operating procedures and protected dumping zones to ensure the safety…
Nothing is possible without the genius of the human being
INTRODUCTION:
Smart parking: the importance of the human factor
In a world where everything is becoming automated, where machines that make our daily life simpler become more and more intelligent and autonomous, interpersonal relationships are becoming a major asset in the employment market – for the good and simple reason that it is still very difficult for a computer to simulate human interaction.
After all, our ability to interact with our entourage is the result of thousands of years of human evolution. In the work place, these skills allow teams to combine their strengths and adapt to changing environments. They are at the heart of man’s advantage over machines.1
Where parking lot management is concerned, the latest technological advances can lead us to believe that these spaces, which are so indispensable for urban vitality, will no longer need humans to function effectively. Smart parking, smart car, smart city, everything is automated: cars drive themselves, a parking lot is found and is paid for remotely thanks to smart phone apps, and city streets are decluttered thanks to real-time signage that directs us toward available spaces.
However, these devices and smart equipment are still far from able to respond with a smile to the various very human questions and requests of users or even to indicate a secure route for money used in transactions, from its entry into the payment system to its deposit into the safes of the parking lot owner.
Parking, even if it is automated and becomes more and more “intelligent,” will still need humans for a long time yet in order to guarantee operational efficiency essential for individual mobility. Moreover, it is the perfect marriage between humans and technology that allows us to target the full potential of parking both today and tomorrow.
When it…
What Lies Ahead for the Canadian Parking Industry?
It’s always fun to speculate about what the future holds. When it comes to parking, it’s particularly enjoyable because the industry is progressing so rapidly. Change has always been a hallmark of the industry as over the years parking designers, planners, and technology developers have worked to keep up with the evolution of the car.
The last few years have been among the most exciting we’ve ever experienced. Recent years have brought the groundbreaking planning innovations of Donald Shoup and his many likeminded colleagues. They’ve also brought a host of design and maintenance innovations that have made parking facilities more useful and durable than ever before. And of course they’ve brought an incredible array of new parking technologies that have transformed the parking experience for drivers while making parking more manageable and cost-effective than ever.
But as exciting as the past few years have been, there are many more exciting parking developments right around the corner. From design, to planning, to technology, we are on the cusp of an extraordinary parking age.
It’s like that song from the eighties said: The future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades.
Planning for the Future
Planning is one of the most exciting features of the parking industry today. Urban planning has undergone extraordinary change in recent years, and parking planning is keeping pace. Some of the most exciting urban planning approaches, such as New Urbanism and Complete Streets, revolve around making cities more pedestrian-friendly and reducing vehicle congestion on the streets. Parking planning plays a vital role in the success of each.
One of the most important elements of parking planning is to use parking resources to influence driver behavior. By strategically placing parking resources, cities and towns can encourage drivers to park and make the transition from driver to pedestrian…
Parking Excellence Recognized in Canada (PERC), later updated to the Parking Facility Standards Award program (PFSA) was the first parking facility evaluation program of its kind, and saw many Canadian parking organizations achieve success through participation in the program.
Derived from these past award programs, a standard checklist of items required to meet acceptable, minimum standards for a parking facility has been further amended and endorsed by the Canadian Parking Association as the benchmark for measuring a facility against national standards.
The objective of sharing this check list is to provide the tools necessary for operators to self-check their parking facilities against minimum requirements to manage and maintain a quality parking operation that sets it above others, and helps to improve the image of the industry. The standards cover a variety of facility types, from gravel lots to state-of-the-art parkades, both old and new.
Through a comprehensive consultative process involving a team of parking professionals representing the municipal, airport, campus, private, and hospital sectors, a set of criteria emerged. The CPA’s Image Committee, comprised of board members from all Canadian sectors, worked in consultation with members from all regions of the country during various stages of development.
Focus groups were conducted in five major cities across Canada: Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and Saint John. More than 300 participants from a range of community sectors were asked to share current and relevant information about their experiences using parking facilities.
Keeping in mind that this study was conducted prior to the technological boom that has evolved and transformed the industry over the past decade, the study’s main focus at the time was on the physical state of the parking facilities and the level of customer service provided to enhance the parking experience. Despite the development and introduction of new technology, maintaining standards in all aspects of…
INTRODUCTION: BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN PARKING: THE ART OF TAMING BIG DATA
Every time a car enters a parking facility, it leaves a trail. A data trail that is. A gate goes up to let a car in, a payment is made, a gate goes up again to let it exit, time and date the car entered and exited, how much the driver paid, the method of payment, and so forth were measured.
When the parking serves a huge flow of traffic, as is the case for an airport or a hospital parking lot, this data trail becomes big. How big? As big as “Big Data”, the relatively new term that refers to the gathering and storing of large amounts of information for analysis.
Of the business leaders polled, 85% said they believed big data will dramatically change the way they do business. The statistics support their perception – data volumes are expected to double every 1.2 years. Another fact, businesses using data analytics are five times more likely to make faster decisionsi.
Big data can produce big returns for businesses. Nowadays, Big Data is a “big” deal, the “new oil” of the digital economy. But big data is a challenge, because of the amount and complexity of data being mined, the high speed and complexities of data flows which can be unpredictable, and the fact that data comes from multiple sources, which makes it difficult to link, match, and transform across systems.
Data, on its own, is worthless. Many organizations are hitting stumbling blocks trying to tame it: part of the problem is the fact that the majority of companies spend 80% of their time manually collecting data for analysis, which leads to inaccuracies. Poor data or ‘lack of understanding the data’ are cited as the primary reasons for over budget projects and could cost…
By Bill Smith
We live in a time of great change when it comes to parking. The industry has been revolutionized in recent years by the development of many new technologies that are designed to make parking more customer-friendly, while at the same time benefitting owners and operators by making operations more manageable. These technological advances have transformed the ways owners and operators manage their parking assets, and they’ve even changed the ways drivers approach parking.
Today, we are on the cusp of another technological revolution that will carry extraordinary implications for the parking industry. The age of connected and self-driving vehicles will soon be in full bloom and each will present a host of challenges and opportunities. While these future vehicles may seem like the stuff of science fiction, it won’t be long before each plays an important role in our transportation system.
Getting Connected
The connected vehicle is already well on its way to becoming a reality. In just a few years all new cars will have vehicle infrastructure communications and will be connected to the grid. Our vehicles will be able to communicate with traffic technology and recommend which routes to take to avoid congestion and reach our destinations more quickly. They will also take us right to available parking spaces and automatically pay for the exact amount of time we need to park.
According to Nigel Bullers, CEO of EasyPark in Vancouver, the primary challenge for operators and municipal parking managers is forecasting what future connected cars will be able to do. He says that, ultimately, there will need to be a meeting of the minds between what auto manufacturers think their smart cars should do and what consumers actually want.
“It’s not as easy as it may seem to predict what features will be present and how operators and municipalities…
By Renee Smith
Data breaches are a constant worry for any business that accepts credit card payments. Over the past decade breaches have become increasingly common, and some of the world’s best known companies, including Home Depot, Target, and TJX, have been the targets of sophisticated attacks through which millions of customers have had their personal and credit data compromised. The sad reality of modern life is that any type of personal or financial data that is obtained electronically and transmitted or stored online is potentially at risk.
The parking industry is not immune to this risk. In fact, now that credit card payment is the dominant and preferred form of payment at most parking facilities, parking owners and operators—both public and private—must be particularly vigilant about protecting customers’ financial data.
The credit card industry, through the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), established a framework to help merchants (including parking owners and operators) protect data. The Council has established the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which is a set of requirements designed to assure that all companies that process, store, or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.
On April 28, 2016 PCI SSC released PCI DSS version 3.2, which replaces version 3.1, to address a growing number of threats to customer payment information. This version becomes effective on February 1, 2018. On May 27, 2016, PCI SSC released PA DSS version 3.2, which becomes effective on June 1, 2016. Until their respective effective dates, parking owners and operators should look to these standards as best practices that can help protect their organizations and their patrons.
What do the newest details of PCI DSS v 3.2 adherence entail? Organizations are subject to two significant new requirements. First, they will need to implement a change control process. Second,…
By Bill Smith
The parking industry is in the midst of what may be its most exciting era. We have seen a lot of change over the past fifty-plus years, including major advances in parking design, planning, and management. These innovations have transformed our communities and improved the quality of life immeasurably. But no period in the parking industry’s history has seen so much exciting change.
What’s so exciting? The technology age that is so important to our everyday lives is transforming parking. New technologies are constantly being introduced to the marketplace, from pay-by-phone technology to online reservation services to innovative facility management packages, just to name a few. Each offers to make parking more customer-friendly, efficient, manageable, or profitable.
But perhaps the most important technologies revolve around parking guidance. Parking guidance tools use sensors to record whether a particular space is occupied. This information is then transmitted to LED signs that guide drivers directly to available spaces. Sensor-based systems also typically have the ability to compile occupancy data to allow parking owners and operators to manage their parking assets more efficiently and profitably.
Clear Benefits
“Guidance systems move motorists into parking spaces quickly and reduce congestion throughout a facility,” according to Shareena Sandbrook, managing director from FrogParking Ltd. “This has benefits for customers in different ways. For example shopping mall operators need to maximize the time customers are in retail areas to boost revenues. While for airports, the goal is to make parking easy and efficient for people hurrying to catch flights. A guidance system shows them quickly, at a glance, where parking spots are available.”
And that’s also the appeal to parkers. Parking guidance systems eliminate the need for drivers to circle parking decks looking for an open space. As soon as a driver approaches a parking structure with a guidance program, exterior signage…
Integrating digital technologies into dynamic parking management
By Indigo
Introduction: THE NEW MOBILITY
As a symbol of freedom, mobility, and autonomy, the automobile has changed the shape of our cities and suburbs, yet in the past century, it has evolved beyond our expectations.
Cars now come equipped with advanced hardware that can avoid collisions, they can be self-driving, and yet the great paradox is that a typical car spends most of its time immobile. A car is parked on average 95% of the time, when it is not stuck in a traffic jam.
The digital revolution, a major upheaval caused by technological advances, primarily computers and the Internet, has placed us in an era of accelerating change.
In industrialized countries, this change has shaken several sectors of the economy. While cars become sophisticated enough to be self-driving, and as automakers become mobility providers, cities become smarter by using and integrating new technologies to meet the challenges of the modern city: transportation, governance, and citizen services, to name a few.
Traffic congestion ranks high on the list of evils that afflict urban areas. It increases greenhouse gas emissions and is largely responsible for the smog in big cities. The search for available parking is, in part, largely responsible for congestion – 90% of city motorists lose up to 20 minutes a day looking for a parking space, by slowly circulating, or by immobilizing traffic to parallel park.
With the emergence of “smart” parking, solutions such as nested technologies in the roadway and parking areas, and connections to new mobile tools are being put in place.
The technological solutions to make parking more fluid, by eliminating traffic obstacles, and customizing and facilitating the driver’s experience exist.
But the growing digital revolution has seen the emergence of a large number of contenders for the next “unicorn”, technological start-ups that disrupt sectors of the…
