Tempo di lettura: 9 minutes
Cities lose more than 40% of potential revenues due to a lack of monitoring and analysis solutions to better understand the influence of pricing strategies and the consequence of ineffective controls. Areas subject to high levels of congestion and unauthorized parking often go unnoticed due to shortcomings and delays in the infrastructure for recording traffic flows and parking usage.
With an ultrasonic sensor widely used in the automotive sector, the Parking Spot Sensor is used to check the occupation status of parking areas. The information collected by the sensors makes it possible to provide citizens a service that directs them to available parking spots, thus making urban traffic significantly more fluid, or to manage innovative services such as PayBySpace or Parking Dynamic Pricing (variation of the parking price based on supply/demand). Furthermore, thanks to the data recorded by the sensors, it is possible to activate new business models that promote more efficient and sustainable management of urban parking spaces.
The PSS makes it possible to activate services to direct people to available parking spaces via smartphone, online, and variable-message panels in order to reduce the search time for parking spaces, which is the main cause of congestion and pollution in cities. Thanks to a predictive algorithm, it is possible to search for available parking spaces based on the place and time of departure/arrival and to be guided to the chosen destination based on predictions about parking availability.
The PSS is an excellent solution to counteract the phenomenon of unauthorized parking, to optimize road control activities, and to improve performance. Thanks to integration with parking payment systems (parking meters, mobile apps), the controller can be directed to parking spaces where the payment has expired, thereby reducing the volume of unauthorized parking.
Using data on the occupation of individual parking spots provided by the PSS, it is possible to activate dynamic parking pricing policies, which increase or decrease parking costs based on real demand (such as peak times, special events, weekends, etc.). Such policies promote a fairer distribution of flows, cut down on traffic and the time spent searching for parking spots (-50% of km traveled, -43% of time), and reduce polluting emissions (-30%). Furthermore, experiments carried out in some American cities have shown how dynamic pricing helps to optimize the occupancy rate and increase the profitability of an individual parking spot.
