By Nigel Bullers, Shirley Rodriguez, and Paul Yakutchik

In a bustling city like Vancouver, where urban density and mobility challenges are constantly on the rise, creating a seamless parking experience is critical. EasyPark Vancouver, in collaboration with technology partners Fennix Systems and ZipBy, has taken a bold step toward revolutionizing the parking landscape. This summer, a groundbreaking technology pilot was launched at two of Vancouver’s busiest parking locations—Lot 19 and Lot 126/31—ushering in a new era of frictionless parking.

The initiative aims to enhance safety, efficiency, and sustainability while making parking as effortless as driving on a toll highway. The results are in, and the innovative solution is already making waves in the industry, setting a benchmark for what parking can—and should—look like in the future.

A Vision for Seamless Parking

At its core, this project addresses a simple yet vital need: the demand for a faster, easier, and more secure parking experience. Traditional parking systems, with their reliance on ticket dispensers and manual payment methods, often create bottlenecks and customer frustration. EasyPark recognized that a transformative solution was needed to eliminate these barriers.

In partnership with Fennix and ZipBy, EasyPark deployed cutting-edge technologies designed to streamline every step of the parking process. The solution integrates Fennix’s AI-powered license plate recognition (LPR) cameras with ZipBy’s innovative mobile app, providing drivers with touchless entry, automated payment, and seamless exits. The system is designed to provide a “drive-through” experience, allowing customers to enter, park, and leave without ever interacting with a meter or gate.

This transformative approach relies on dual optical and infrared LPR cameras with an impressive 99% accuracy rate. These cameras identify vehicles in real-time, enabling the system to open gates automatically. Meanwhile, ZipBy’s app leverages Bluetooth and GPS to track parking sessions, notify drivers when…

By Nigel Bullers

Car share is transforming how people think about their daily commuting needs and that is seen on the west coast more than any of the other market; Seattle, Portland and here in Canada, Vancouver is at the epicenter of the adoption of car share. Car share has evolved over the past decade, early adopters were people that cashed in their personal cars and headfirst into car share as the only option alongside public transit. Today the users are different, many of them have multiple vehicles at home and they hold multiple car share accounts. Car share has become part of a total transportation solution for drivers. Although these new users are slightly different than the early adopters, the needs remain the same – the desire for easy parking close to destinations and pick up points, and frictionless, quick parking solutions.

Parking at the destination

In downtown urban centers some of the parking facilities will be gated, as is true in Vancouver where Pacific Centre has some 1500 spaces exactly where car share users would like to go. But in the past, car share had challenges with gated lots and lots underground where they lost the signal and would lose cars and thus inventory.

Evo Car Share and EasyPark partnered to bring car share to Pacific Centre. The process entailed enhancements to the repeaters so that vehicles would not go dark when going underground, and by devising a solution for billing for the cars going in and out of the lot. The early program worked in a very basic way, whereby drivers would simply pull a ticket, leave that ticket on the dash and then the next driver would hand that ticket to the booth attendant, who would process the ticket. Evo was billed at…