Park Smart Parking Solution for Smart Cities
Finding a car parking often becomes a real problem that causes loss of time, increasing pollution and traffic. According to the insurer Allianz in industrialized countries, drivers usually spend an extra 15 minutes on routine trips looking for an empty spot. This means that over a lifetime, they spend more than 8,325 hours looking for a spot about 347 days. An authoritative research made by Prof. Shoup ( Cruising for Parking, ACCESS Magazine, 2007) considers that slow-moving vehicles searching for parking affect up to 30% of the urban traffic. Moreover, according to a 2011 IBM survey, in the past year, nearly six out of 10 drivers have abandoned their search for a space at least once, and more than a quarter have gotten into an argument with a fellow motorist over a parking space. In addition to the typical traffic congestion caused by daily commutes and gridlock from construction and accidents, reports have estimated that over 30 % of traffic in a city is caused by drivers searching for a parking spot. Not only do inefficient parking systems result in congestion and increased carbon emissions, they also waste commuters time, lead to lost productivity and economic opportunities and can lead to inefficient city services. In fact, over half of all drivers in 16 of the 20 cities surveyed reported that they have been frustrated enough that they gave up looking for a parking space and simply drove somewhere else. Parking management companies, especially the ones that control the spaces next to roadways, despite the high level of profitability achievable from the single space, lose up to 50% of their revenue in uncontrolled parking events despite the high level of profitability achievable from the single space. These data explain clearly how it is important that driver find fast an available parking place, so to reduce the number of circulating vehicles and decrease urban congestion. 2
Park Smart is a smart parking solution company who strongly believe it s possible to make life easier by developing smart technology services in order to create new urban mobility models for smart cities. At Park Smart we work to overcome this challenge. Our vision is to build a more efficient city-life, letting citizens save precious time by avoiding stressful situations, reducing pollution and traffic congestion consequently improving quality of life and creating positive effects for the whole community. Founded in 2014 by a mechanical engineer and a software developer student, the company implemented a software-based technology able to analyse, in real time, the availability of parking lots in the cities. Park Smart uses the physical infrastructure of video sensors, even the ones already existing in the area, to process the images. With the help of our unique management software, the system analyses the video stream by creating a fluid matrix showing vacant and occupied parking spaces. Information is then made available to drivers on their smartphone in order to indicate parking availability in the nearest areas in real time. Park Smart presents a fast and efficient way for drivers to find available parking on their smartphone and provides powerful tools to help parking management companies to attract new customers and maximize their revenue. Furthermore, the software platform is able to work in synergy with other smart-city services and it will contribute to help public administration to organize public spaces more efficiently. Park Smart is therefore the synergistic integration of different technologies: video analysis, management software and mobile application. The heart of the project consists of an algorithm that digitally analyzes video streams from cameras, detects the status of occupied/vacant 3
places and records them within a database. This database then it s accessible both to parking management companies, to make an efficient service and to drivers, helping them to find the closest available parking place. The unique qualities of Park Smart are: Life is what happens to other people when you are looking for parking Software based solution. The system can be simply improved, refined, adapted and upgraded because the core product is just the combination of software. No hardware obsolescence. Multilevel Control. Our system is able to monitor not only the single parking space but even each car parked, allowing our customer to provide a varied number of services - from operators management to customer care and marketing opportunity. Synergy with other smart-cities services. The system would be able to provide additional services like traffic analysis, mobility simulation car sharing and car pooling services, and so on. 4
Park Smart The New Frontier of Urban Mobility Park Smart C.so Italia 189 Catania, 95127- Italy www.parksmart.it