Why Did Digital Parking Solution Become Necessary In Brazil?

by Marcos Morelli Software solutions provider for on-street parking

To search the parking space is often an annoying day-to-day activity for most of the people across all over the world. Due to this search, almost one million barrel of oil burns every day. It has been observed that there are four parking spaces available per person in the US, and most streets are unoccupied for the maximum time, lead to urban environments accommodate more vehicles than humans.

These problems would worsen as the global population is being urbanized continuously without any well planned and convenience driven retreat from cars. The most suitable solution for this problem is a smart street parking app or solutions, which digitally manage the parking spots.

The Approach Of Smart Parking

To solve these problems, the first step is “Smart Parking”. It involves the use of real-time data collection, low-cost sensors, and smartphone-enabled automated payment which allow people to reserve the parking spot in advance. They can also accurately predict where they can find the space to park their vehicle.

When smart parking is deployed as a system, it reduces car emissions in the urban centers by minimizing the need of unnecessarily circle the city blocks in search of parking. Moreover, it permits cities to carefully supervise their parking supply.

Smart Parking Plots Programs

These programs are being deployed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Beijing, Stockholm, São Paulo, the Netherlands, as well as Shanghai. In Los Angeles, smart meters and low-power sensors track the occupancy all the way through one of the most congested areas of this city, Hollywood district. Here, the users are allowed to access the occupancy data to find out the availability of parking spots and pay for them from their smartphones.

In addition to environmental benefits and lending convenience, smart parking is improving the usability of existing parking. This step leads to generate greater revenue for the parking owners. Moreover, it has been seen that Los Angeles has experienced a good return on investment in the smart parking within a very short span of time.

These programs are able to make the differences on locale, still, more widespread deployment, as well as development, are needed for smart parking. It contributes towards improving the transportation-sector of cities.

Challenges Associated With Smart Parking

The problem with implementing smart parking is that no citywide solution exists across fragmented public or private parking providers. Even if occupancy data exists, it will tend to have a lot of owners, also won’t be accessible or standardized in a way which would allow the software developers for turning it to some user-friendly apps.

Hence, an individual smart parking effort so far is locally successful, still, uncoordinated, operating in its own entrepreneurial or bureaucratic vacuums without having benefits of the universally-applicable insights for scaling their operations globally or city wide.

The gap between the existing parking programs and more wide transportation system planning is a massive missed opportunity for the cities for reducing transportation-related emissions, at the global scale.

Along with the challenges that are associated with lack of standardization and multiple data owners, smart parking solution has been hindered by the lack of insight to full advantages of smart parking approaches, particularly when it comes to the cost of creating additional parking spaces. The lack of collaboration among software developers, smart parking plot programs, and hardware providers have contributed to the adoption of smart parking.

Though, it is possible to address as well as resolve these issues. The cost of hardware-based solutions and sensors is decreasing rapidly. It has allowed companies and cities to gather new and detailed data on the transportation patterns.

As smartphones are continuously capturing more and more of telecommunication market in both developed and developing nations, software entrepreneurs can collect as well as analyze data and deliver information and insight to the consumers in new ways which won’t require any new hardware installation.

Benefits Of Smart Parking

The system advantages of smart parking are much more than just avoiding the unnecessary circling around city blocks. It enables cities to built the completely integrated multimodal intelligent parking solutions which do not rely on cars. Developing smart parking solution within city needs data standardization as well as coordination; hardware and software technology; mobile phone integration; and the coordination among multiple stakeholders.

These stakeholders and technical solutions are essential to developing a smart-phone-enabled, fully integrated, multi-modal transportation solution. Their coordination and efforts behind the development of smart parking solution gave a quick start to the fully-integrated transportation system.

To Sum Up

Eventually, smart street parking apps will completely transform the parking arrangement in cities. The cities will have updated building codes as well as land use policies which would be able to reduce the need for parking. Thus, the cities will become more compact, greener, cleaner, and more importantly bikeable, walkable, and serviceable by the multimodal transportation system.