The French city has deployed a smart parking solution with Libelium’s technology while the U.S city has launched a smart parking app
The smart parking industry continues to grow and has emerged as a major internet of things (IoT) use case that falls under the umbrella of smart transportation. An increasing number of cities around the world struggle with traffic congestion and lack of parking space. Smart parking solutions also help cities to reduce congestion and pollution as they eliminate the need for vehicles to circle looking for spaces.
Montpellier is a small French city of the region of Occitanie. Its 270,000 inhabitants suffer, as in every other city, from traffic jams and lack of available parking slots.
In a move to solve this problem, French company Synox has been working with Montpellier municipal government to launch a smart parking solution, developed with Spanish IoT firm Libelium’s technology, named “Connected Parking”.
The main goal of this smart parking project was to make traffic more fluid and increase rotation at parking spaces near the town hall and the local shopping center. A total of twenty smart parking nodes were installed by Synox in two different areas of the city: six at the surroundings of the Montpellier Town Hall (Hôtel de Ville de Montpellier) and the rest on the nearby Parc Marianne district.
These devices were installed in the surface of the roadway on the parking areas for people with reduced mobility and delivery services with the aim to relieve congestion, streamline traffic, and improve access to car park areas. In the future, the project stipulates the deployment of more nodes throughout the city.
Sensors gather data about the temperature of the roadway which will be used by local authorities to take action in case of the presence of ice sheets.
The sensor network is connected to the Montpellier’s LoRaWAN private network while data management displays show this real-time information and indicators of the use of car parking slots in order to improve the traffic conditions and diminish car parking search time.
“The smart parking project made it possible to easily deploy on private LoRaWAN network infrastructure an analysis of the strategic car park availability, for the city mobility services, the City Police, and soon the citizens themselves. Have a better understanding and a better management of car park availability and traffic in the city is a major key point to improve citizen’s life”, said Jérôme Fenwick, CTO at Synox.
Also, the city of Sarasota, in Florida, has partnered with U.S firm Streetline to launch Parker, a parking guidance app to improve mobility for residents and visitors by highlighting available parking.
Through the use of this mobile app for iPhone and Android smartphones, the city of Sarasota will receive detailed analytics to help it plan programs and set parking policies that enhance city mobility.
Streetline’s system detects when spaces are available. That information is sent to Streetline’s space estimation engine, which in turn publishes that data to provide the location and availability of on-street spaces in real-time, as well as locations, rates, and hours of operation for garages and lots.
