The spectacular experience: smart parking

Have you been wasting time searching around to look for your parked car, wondering why it disappeared in this maze? Were you ever blocked at one of the parking exits because of traffic jam? Are you fed up with having to handle parking tickets for payments? Car owners could save at least 10-15 minutes of their time in parking with the help of proximity technology…

Many car parks have already started to use new technologies to address those issues but while some solutions are very costly and others difficult to implement, proximity technology opens new doors for enhancing customer experience in parking

Parking Services enabled by Proximity Technology include:

Driver detection: no ticket, less trouble

Imagine when you drive into a car park, the entrance gate is opened for you automatically without you having to stop your car and grab the ticket. This is all possible with you logging into an enrolled parking app, beacons can detect you, open the gate for you and, when you exit, debit the amount on your account based on how long you parked your car.

Car finding: no more car hunting or photo taking

With beacons deployed in the car park, your location can be recorded automatically as you park your car. So once you get back to the car park, an automatic message can pop-up on your phone asking if you wish to get directions to your car and the app will show you the way.

Exit suggestion

By leveraging real-time traffic data, you can get traffic information around different parking exits as you go back to your car. The app will tell you the best exit to avoid this traffic, saving you precious time.

So who’s up for it?

Juniper Research awarded Barcelona as the best Smart City in 2015 thanks to initiatives from the local government to deploy sensors for detecting vacant parking space on street. While in Japan, there have been apps for individuals to share their private parking space to drivers who browse through nearby vacant parking lots using GPS. Similar to Airbnb’s shared economy concept, this is mutually beneficial to drivers and private parking space owners.

In Hong Kong, some shopping malls have already deployed beacons to provide a “find my car” function so that app users can get directions to where they parked their car.

In France, a large property developer is testing the real-time traffic information service powered by Ubudu so customers can choose the car park exit with less traffic jam in order to save time. This service is jointly offered on the shopping mall’s app with other proximity technology services delivered throughout the shopping mall.