Smart Parking for Growing Urban Cities
While transiting around in Delhi or any other metro city in India the basic and most turbulent moment arises when we think of parking our vehicle. With growing number of vehicles the parking lots are suffocating. The only way to ease these urban challenges is smart parking.
Long Traffic jams have become a source of annoyance and anger that has become a part of people’s lives living in the cities and especially for the working class that has to reach their offices on time. But with emerging technologies, leading solution providers and companies are eyeing to ease this hassle through unique smart parking offerings.
The cities are finding some space to alter their traditional parking systems which is road sides to smart parking systems.
This ever-increasing traffic congestion and the lack of open slots in the parking have thus enforced the need for a Smart Parking System.
Smart Parking Systems are specifically designed to give their drivers an ultimate solution on their journey from start to end without requiring searching for parking, cost, travel time, etc.
With the parking space problem specified and its solution named, a bigger question that comes to mind would be what can this technology do to solve it and is it cost-effective and useful in real-time?
Unravelling Smart Parking System
Smart Parking System can be counted as a parking strategy combining technology and human innovation to use as few resources as possible like fuel, time and space to achieve faster and easier parking of vehicles while they remain idle.
Smart parking systems play a noteworthy role in saving fuel as the vehicles can be guided directly to the empty parking space as compared to the current scenario where a customer has to search for a parking space suited to his needs.
Smart Parking System Operations
Using IoT
Smart parking system development can be defined as an IoT-based system that sends data about vacant and occupied parking places via the web or through the mobile application. And with an IoT device, consisting of sensors and microcontrollers, located in each parking place the system will get the required data. The user will be able to get a live update about the availability of all parking places and can choose the best one.
Smart parking systems often use cameras and sensors to collect real-time data for measuring the width of space between the vehicle and the parking slot sensor to measure the condition of the parking occupancy. Smart parking system navigates visitors to free parking spots based solely on the data collected and data stored on its system. This, in turn, helps in better management of the parking system, which will result in increased revenues as well as time-saving for the driver as well.
Using AI
When say AI, the first thing that comes to our mind is an image of Jarvis from the Iron Man movie, a popular AI assistant character that was capable of performing a lot of different things. Nonetheless, the application of AI doesn’t have to be so complex.
A smart parking system is one of the real-world applications of AI. AI can easily detect parking spaces in a given image and can determine if a given parking slot is available or occupied using a video feed. This type of system can be used as an alternative to different kinds of sensors whose installation and maintenance costs come up to be very expensive.
AI-based smart parking systems analyze data like vehicular traffic, vehicle type, peak hour timings, and type of frequency to forecast future trends and gives a seamless parking experience over time. Digital Payment usage can also assist in saving time for the visitor and also help the parking operator to run the parking lot efficiently.
Trials Faced in Implementing Smart Parking Systems
With the use of a wide variety of software and hardware to implement the system, one has to make significant changes in their vehicles sometimes as well as investment. And though, Smart parking systems save money and time in the long run, one experiences low savings in the initial stages.
Also, there is a serious need for awareness for a smart parking system as people tend to park their vehicles according to their convenience and will with little to no consideration for others.
Leading Indian Companies
Get My Parking: Founded in 2015, the company is a provider of an Interoperable Smart Parking Platform that connects all parking and mobility stakeholders on a common platform.
ParkingRhino: ParkingRhino provides an IoT-based Smart Parking Platform that is equipped with a unique set of technology and data capabilities that is able to solve parking management and congestion issues in the cities.
ValetEZ: The company is a smart parking and mobility solutions firm that manages parking spaces and ensures minimizing the constant pain that vehicle owners face every day during parking spot hunting in the city.
VersionX: VersionX provides Smart Parking System with a unique parking management solution. With its unique feature of adopting different types parking spaces, the platform helps in digitizing end-to-end parking processes for multi-tenant and multi-level parking.
Parkwheels: Parkwheels provides RFID based smart parking system solution that is an integrated solution for offices. The system confirms hassle-free movement of employee vehicles for coming in and out of the office premise. Unique RFID tags are usually affixed to every employee’s car and thus the RFID reader deployed at the parking entrance reads it and the automatic boom barrier system opens only in that case. This system verifies that the entry is offered to authorized vehicles only.
