Multimodality and Parking: The End-to-End Customer Journey

By Adamo Donatucci

The last mile of any journey is often the most fraught.

This phenomenon was first conceptualized by utilities and communications providers that were able to, for example, deliver their products to a neighbourhood easily but then experienced challenges connecting individual homes.

Likewise, logistics companies can easily coordinate delivering many goods to a central depot, but often experience difficulty finalizing the delivery to individual homes because a signature is required but the homeowner isn’t available. It’s also the most expensive and time-consuming part of the logistics lifecycle, so there’s a great deal of interest in finding more efficient solutions.

Similar matters occur in the realm of parking: getting to a concert venue downtown is easy enough but finding an affordable parking space nearby can be consuming.

As an increasing proportion of the world’s population lives in urban centres and those centres become increasingly dense, we can expect these dilemmas to worsen over time. To address these matters as they arise, companies are leveraging people’s interconnectedness with technology to develop solutions that are flexible and sustainable.

Last-Mile Parking Technology

Ninety-eight percent of parking transactions today leverage technology at some point in the transaction process. This includes anything from a driver visiting a pay-on-foot kiosk on their way back to their vehicle before leaving a parking garage, looking online to compare rates near their intended destination, to scanning a QR code posted near a parking meter to pay for a session without touching a machine.

In the context of the parking industry, last-mile technology includes everything that makes the driver’s life simpler and more convenient and lets them get to their destination more quickly and efficiently. In practical terms, this means reserved parking with ancillary services like electric vehicle (EV) charging and detailing, or apps that locate…

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