Smart Parking and Smart Cities

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By Dominique Bonte | 4Q 2017 | IN-4801

For city governments, smart parking represents a direct, short term revenue generating opportunity. It helps generate revenues from valuable parking space which is not monetized. In fact, it is one of a very small number of smart city applications which generates revenue, next to advertising on kiosks and other types of digital signage. Together with smart street lights and smart bins, this represents the “holy trinity” of current smart city applications.

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Smart Parking: a Quick Win for City Governments and an Opportunity for GovTech Start-ups

NEWS


For city governments, smart parking represents a direct, short term revenue generating opportunity. It helps generate revenues from valuable parking space which is not monetized. In fact, it is one of a very small number of smart city applications which generates revenue, next to advertising on kiosks and other types of digital signage. Together with smart street lights and smart bins, this represents the “holy trinity” of current smart city applications.

Apart from raising (more) parking money for cities, the key benefits of smart parking solutions are linked to reduced congestion resulting in a positive impact on both the environment (better air quality; reduction of CO2 emissions due to less search traffic) and the economic development of cities (less time lost in traffic for citizens and enterprises).

Types of smart parking solutions include:

  • Embedded Sensors – Street-side and indoor parking space detection sensors allows the direct, one-to-one, real-time monitoring and communication of parking availability. Low cost LPWA connectivity technologies like NB-IoT, LoRa, and SigFox are critical for achieving long battery lives for off the grid systems.
  • Street-side Overhead Sensors – Vendors like Siemens and Cleverciti are exploring the use of image and radar sensors to simultaneously monitor multiple parking spots.
  • Mobile Sensors – A wide range of image, radar, and motion sensors in both smartphones and vehicles can be leveraged for mobile crowdsourcing of real-time parking data. This is explored by players like Ford, Bosch (Community Parking), and Anagog.

While the above solutions can be deployed together, complementing each other in various ways, the cost advantages and greater flexibility of street-side and  mobile sensors will ultimately undermine the business case of single use case embedded sensors. This will influence investment decisions of cities in the future. Analyzing parking events and related vehicle movements will also increasingly rely on AI and deep learning. 

An Emerging Smart Parking Tech Ecosystem: Libelium, CommuniThings, and Cleverciti

IMPACT


3 start-ups among a growing number of smart parking solution vendors are worth zooming in on:

  • Libelium – The Waspmote Plug&Sense! road surface parking device can be mounted on the road surface enabling fast installation. It features a double radio simultaneously supporting LoRa and SigFox and remote management. Battery lifetime can reach up to 10 years. Libelium’s Connected Parking solution was deployed in the French city of Montpellier’s smart parking project based on a private LoRaWAN network. Twenty Waspmote Plug & Sense! Smart Parking nodes were installed by Synox in two different areas of the city. The sensors also collect temperature data which can be used by road authorities for winter road maintenance. A great example of a multi-use case smart city approach.
  • CommuniThings – Mainly focused on IoT platforms for the collection of street data from fixed or mobile connected objects to improve mobility. CommuniThings applications ranging from smart-parking, to fleet management and air quality were showcased at the Smart Cities Week in Washington DC in October 2017. The PARKALLY zones solutions supports free-of-charge short duration parking near commercial areas based on underground sensors. A merchant app allows retailers to offer parking time extensions when a spending threshold is reached, a nice example of a market adjacency between mobility and retail. Other parking profiles such as disabled parking, delivery zones and other on-street public parking are also supported.
  • Cleverciti – Based in Munich, Cleverciti develops overhead sensor technology for on-street, open-air, and corporate parking detection and management; it also develops mobile apps, management software, and analytics. A single sensor can monitor up to 100 parking spaces over a range of 400 meters. They can be mounted “plug-and-play” on building facades, masts, or lamp posts, and are easily relocated. Image processing takes place within the smart sensors which feature high performance octa-core on-board processors. Location coordinates are transmitted via encrypted Wi-Fi. Cleverciti targets cities and parking operators. It claims that drivers spend up to 20 minutes searching for parking spaces and that 30% of traffic and pollution is caused by search traffic. 

Smart Parking and the Parkingless Smart Mobility of the Future: a Closing Window of Opportunity

COMMENTARY


Mobility as a Service (MaaS) paradigms based on driverless car sharing and next-generation transit will gradually displace vehicle ownership and remove the accompanying need for parking spaces. As a consequence, the relevance of smart parking will gradually decrease. Even in the short-term, smart parking does not move the needle in terms of addressing the fundamental issues of congestion. It does however offer valuable convenience for end users, especially when market adjacencies are included, and some welcome revenues for cities. Additionally, for many cities which are just starting to deploy their first smart solutions, it offers a valuable learning experience paving the way for more structural and larger scale projects in the future.

In terms of which parking sensor infrastructure paradigms should be adopted by cities in the short term – embedded versus overhead versus mobile – it is important to consider more flexible deployments which can serve multiple use cases over and beyond single parking space availability monitoring. In this respect overhead sensors are not only able to monitor multiple parking spaces but also identifying other activity like pedestrian crossing and vehicle traffic flow. At the same time, it needs to be balanced against the additional cost for optimum ROI.