Smart Parking in Delivering Positive Change to Mobility
Mission-oriented innovation is a novel approach in the European Union policy to spur sustainable growth encompassing new technologies and business models for the benefits of society. Providing multi-modal transport application through environmentally sustainable practices is an ambitious goal we pursue by participating in The European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) New Mobility Services (NMS) Initiative.
Optimizing urban transport and making it more integrated requires collaboration between multiple stakeholders – governments, research, technology and service providers, data connectivity parties, public transport companies and so on. EIP-SCC provides tools for cross-sectoral collaboration thus facilitating adoption of smart city solutions.
During the first Partner Meeting of the NMS initiative which took place on the 21st of February in Brussels, Iwona Skowronek and Marek Stawiński were representing Ekinno Lab and NaviParking companies, contributing from the side of SMEs among other partners from local, regional, EU governments, research and consultancy bodies, European civil society networks. Representing business has one essential advantage – can bring concrete solutions to implement, while being agile and adaptative.
According to Gartner, 79% of top performing organisations participate in digital ecosystems and have an average of 105 digital partners. We are close to reach this number, as the NMS meeting was attended by 80 international participants. Together we are able to transform mobility patterns, decrease congestion and turn challenges into opportunities.
In the course of the meeting we were taking part in dedicated workshops during which we shared our knowledge how to improve management of existing parking assets in the city and reduce by 30% traffic caused by drivers-cruising around looking for a spot to park.
Also, as parking data is an important part of transportation data as a whole, our platform could be used by decision makers for planning purposes and enable developing other services resulting in CO2 reduction. We came up with an idea of achieving a quick win and deploying solution integrating parkings with e-bike/e-scooter shared service to enable drivers to leave their cars at the parking and switch to more ecofriendly mode of transport.
The NMS initiative is on the point of gaining momentum and defining an action plan. For the time being, the challenges we identified during the workshops are as following.
For Transport Management workgroup:
- creating a robust ecosystem integrating data from many sources, services, networks
- gathering information in real time
- analysis of congestion and relocation of the systems managing traffic signals
- building a platform based on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) combining traffic management, parking management and multimodal services
- open data, integrated platform and seamless billing/payments as prerequisities
- more orchestration between authorities.
For The First/last Mile solutions work-group:
- lack of a common transport data hub
- integrating public and private mobility services
- gathering parking data from all kinds of car parks (public, private, on-street, commercial)
- aggregating citywide sensor network
- standardization of APIs exposed by Parking Management Systems Vendors
- integration of parking data and mobility services data with smart city architecture within city open data strategy – to provide real-time data analytics to speed up travel time.
As a continuation of the NMS meeting, we will participate in the plenary and demonstration session organised by Sustainable Urban Mobility Action Cluster during Intertraffic Amsterdam. We look forward to participating in it!
Iwona Skowronek
