The act of parking a car has not seen much innovation throughout the past century, but that is starting to change. That’s good news for cities, where some studies have found that up to 50 percent of traffic comprises drivers searching for an open parking spot. As wireless sensors became more affordable, rugged and configurable during the past decade, they have helped to spawn a new approach to metered parking spaces, enabling cities and private parking services providers to charge dynamically, based on demand, while also making it easier for drivers to quickly locate available spots, thereby reducing congestion.
In 2006, the city of San Francisco launched a seven-year pilot project in which it embedded 8,200 occupancy sensors next to on-street parking spaces throughout the city, in order to better track patterns and evaluate its meter pricing scheme, with the goal of setting meter rates based on demand patterns. This work began with a small pilot conducted with Streetline Networks (see SF Uses Wireless Sensors to Help Manage Parking).
During the pilot phase, drivers could use a smartphone app known as SFPark to quickly find open metered spots, based on sensor data collected over a mesh network and sent to the cloud via a gateway. The SFPark app used an application programming interface (API) to access and continually update the data, as did similar apps such as ParkMe. (When the sensors’ battery life began to reach their limits last year, the city discontinued its sensor-based metered parking spot data collection—to the chagrin of drivers who had regularly used the parking app.)
Currently, dozens of cities throughout the United States are installing their own smart parking applications, using occupancy sensors that communicate wirelessly with smart parking meters. The market has become more crowded as well, with several meter and parking services companies—such as San Diego-based IPS Group—now offering smart meters that communicate directly with occupancy sensors embedded in roadways.
While most of these smart metering systems are installed in public parking areas, Walnut Creek, Calif., is unique in that not only its government, but also a local private parking service provider, Regional Parking, have installed IPS occupancy sensors at metered parking spots in private garages located in busy sections of the city’s downtown corridor. These sensors forward data showing parking spot availability to the cloud, where the information can then be accessed by parking application developers to create apps designed to alert drivers to the availability of open metered spots. The occupancy sensor includes a magnetometer and a short-range wireless connection between each sensor and associated meter, according to IPS Group. (The company has not responded to multiple requests for more detailed information regarding the specific standards and protocols the sensors employ.)
Matt Huffaker, an assistant to Walnut Creek’s city manager, says that he believes Walnut Creek is the only U.S. city in which the smart metering system is being used by both public and private entities, and where the occupancy data collected from both systems is being pushed to the cloud, to be accessed by app developers.
“When we first came up with the idea [of adding sensors to meters to enable a real-time availability app for drivers], we thought about doing our own app,” says Bob Powers, Regional Parking’s owner. But he soon realized that opening up parking availability data to mobile application providers who focus on a much larger geographic area, rather than just Walnut Creek, would enable a greater number of drivers to take advantage of the system.
Today, every time a parking meter receives a signal from the sensor indicating its assigned parking spot is occupied or available, the meter transmits this data to IPS Group’s cloud-based server. From there, IPS also forwards the information to ParkMe Inc., a Santa Monica, California-based provider of parking information systems. Using both specific metered parking spot data such as this, as well as information about parking available in garages lacking metered spots (determined by counters at the ticket gate), the ParkMe app—which is also available for in-car navigation systems—allows a driver to identify available parking in towns and cities around the world, as well as at scores of U.S. locations.
Any ParkMe user, regardless of whether he or she is a Walnut Creek resident, can use the app to find available parking within the city.
The sensor system rollout did not proceed without hiccups, Powers notes. “When we first put the sensors in, around 2010, we had some issues that we could not figure out,” he says. “Sometimes, people would call and say they paid the meter, but that [while they were away] the meter had reset itself.” As a result, these drivers were issued citations that they would contest. “The cool part is, with this technology, you can call up the parking history and see where they were parked, exactly how much they paid, when they paid and when the meter reset.” Based on this information, he explains, Regional Parking could waive the citation if the customer should not have received it. “Sometimes, we’d also issue them a gift card,” Powers adds.
To determine what was causing the false reads, Powers examined the parking sites. In one case, there was a large metal drainage grate next to a space. The presence of that metal, he says, was causing the sensor to falsely determine that a car had left the parking space, and to thus reset the meter. But for other parking spots, the cause of the issue remained a mystery. A small tweak to the sensor communication protocol has solved that problem, Powers reports. Rather than sending a reset command to the meter whenever the sensor detects that a car has left the parking space, it waits and performs a second check a few seconds later. If the space is still unoccupied—confirming that the vehicle has, in fact, vacated the spot—the sensor signal triggers the meter to reset.