By Shreeras Shetty

Parking meters are gaining immense traction in various countries across the globe, owing to the significant surge in traffic congestion by vehicles and surging need for parking meters to manage parking spaces. There has been an expeditious growth in the number of vehicles across the globe, which further drives the demand for parking meters in the coming years. Parking meters are extensively installed in high traffic, commercial, and healthcare places including the hospitals, government institutions, malls & stadium, public parks, and others. Thus, with the COVID-19 restrictions eased-off, more people around the globe are tending to attend various functions, concerts, malls, stadiums, and others. This is expected to drive the demand for parking meters in the coming years. 

Moreover, public infrastructures such as libraries, tourist attraction places, transit stations, civic buildings, universities, and others generate an immense parking demand. Hence, parking meter comes out as an effective solution towards reducing the traffic and managing parking spaces. In addition, municipalities are extensively using parking meters particularly for mobility management policies and on-street parking policy regarding the traffic. Persistent technological advancements in parking meters, introduction of creative products, and integration with innovative technologies are expected to provide lucrative opportunities for the growth of the global parking meter market. 

Growing prevalence of IoT-based technology that provides solutions while looking for a parking space is remarkably augmenting the installation of pioneering and effective parking management solutions. Further, these factors are expected to provide tremendous opportunities for the growth of the global parking meter market in the upcoming years. According to a report published by Allied Market Research, the global parking meter market is expected to grow expeditiously in the coming years. 

Numerous players in the market are devising innovative strategies to add supplementary features in the parking meters, while the others are launching completely new and progressive product to cater to demand of people. For instance, Gogoro Inc., a dominant global technology player in battery swapping ecosystems, collaborated with Shengming Technology, a Taiwan-based technical development and customer enablement company, to launch a smart parking meter. They also launched a new urban battery initiative that utilizes the Gogoro-powered smart parking meters. They together prolong the battery lifetime value and facilitate smart city infrastructure deployment at the same time. This smart parking meter allows cities to enjoy smart city technologies for their respective parking locations that connect wirelessly and are way off the power grid. 

The new smart parking meter is being extensively deployed in New Taipei City Taiwan, and hence it became operational in early 2022. About 6,000 additional smart parking meters are expected to roll out across Taiwan by the end of 2022. Thus, co-developed by Gogoro and Shengming Technology, the smart parking meter initiates a new revolution of modern urban management for cities to develop into smart cities and be more connected without the need of time-consuming and extortionate electricity grid construction. 

The trend of launching breakthrough parking meters continues to gain massive momentum among prominent players and countries across the globe. For instance, Hong Kong has launched its first batch of newly installed sensor-based smart parking meters. Smart parking meter is an instrumental part of the Hong Kong Transport Department’s smart mobility initiatives. These smart parking meters are equipped with sensors that make use of millimetre wave radar to determine which of the parking spaces on the roadside are occupied. The sensors will not collect any sort of details of vehicle types or personal information, and hence will only detect the occupancy of parking spaces. These parking meters are significantly reducing the amount of circulating traffic and, also the total time required to locate free parking spaces. 

The real-time information provided by the smart parking meters will be propagated via three channels namely “HKeMeter”, the mobile app: “HKeMobility”, the web version, and data.gov.hk, the public sector information portal. Thus, real-time information passing can appreciably help motorists to easily find a vacant parking space. These new parking meters in Hong Kong can support a number of payment systems, be it contactless credit cards like UnionPay QuickPass, Visa payWave, and MasterCard Contactless, or faster payment systems like AlipayHK, Union QR, and WeChat Pay. They also support smart card Octopus. 

In addition, these parking meters seamlessly support remote and on-site payment of parking tickets through its mobile app HKeMeter, which is available on both Play Store and App Store. The Hong Kong’s Transport Department mentioned that the replacement of conventional parking meter with smart parking meter will be done in phases, and hence most of it will be done by the first half of 2022. The department envisions to install 12,000 smart parking meters. 

Get detailed COVID-19 impact analysis on the Parking Meter Industry at Allied Market Research. 

Author Bio
Shreeras Shetty

Shreeras Shetty is currently working in the content writing industry and has a Bachelor’s degree in management studies specializing in marketing. He is passionate about writing and is gaining a significant experience in the Market Research Industry. Outside the office, Shreeras is actively engaged in recreational activities like playing football, trekking, travelling, and athletics.