Smart Parking Solution

Road Infrastructure in our cities are severely adopting IT/IoT enabled smart parking solutions to ease traffic congestion and regularize parking. This will improve city landscape apart from benefitting commuters/citizens as well as municipal corporations says Vishal Mehra, Vice President & Director, iRam Technologies

Smart Parking solution improves parking space utilization, and revenue of municipal corporations by guiding the users to the nearest available parking slot. Interestingly on-street smart parking technology is deployed on city roads by clearly enforcing/marking/defining a side of the road as parking lane. The drivers have anyway been using this lane for waiting/parking for over the years free of cost and causing traffic snarls.

Now with IT/IoT enabled on-street smart parking solution, the surface sensors installed on every bay in the parking lanes monitors the occupancy of the parking lots. They relay accurate occupancy information to Parking Operations Control Center via a network of Parking Gateways. The drivers/citizens can access this information through citizen mobile app and overhead display boards installed at on-street parking lanes. In real time, it allows users to view, on a map, all the parking spaces that are available. The citizen mobile app is very user-friendly and easy to use for finding the nearest parking area, and then guiding to the empty parking space. Citizen can even reserve parking spaces and make online payments through e-wallets/credit card/debit card etc.

The solution has a wide variety of parking reservations like Online Reservation through computer browser or mobile app, monthly pass and walk-in parking. This system allows both static and dynamic models and the pricing can be set based on type of vehicle, type of parking area, holidays/working days, duration of parking, category of passes etc. In order to prevent fraud, the system allows only government officials to set the rates and the rates are displayed in the Information Display Panels. QR coded parking tickets are generated and users are encouraged to make cashless payments through credit card/debit card/city pre-paid cards etc. Cash is an option but in coming years most citizens will find it much earlier to use digital payment methods.

Key Benefits

For Smart Cities / Municipal Corporations / Parking Operators:

• Avoiding additional expenses of constructing new parking structures by utilising on-street parking lanes.
• Sustainable traffic management for increased vehicle density in future
• Increased revenue due to better utilization and prevents frauds and plugs revenue leaks
• Dynamic pricing
• Low network bandwidth usage
• Alarms/Notifications
• High Availability: Supports offline operations; regular data backups

For the Motorist:

• Reduce the amount of time required to find nearest parking
• Give data to the commuter to make informed decisions
• Reduced carbon monoxide emission with in the parking lot
• Easy turn-around of available spots with the help of LED display
• SOP for servicing; app notification for all possible errors; very lowdown time