Chapel Hill Partners with Flowbird to Upgrade Downtown Parking Experience

The Town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina has completed the installation of a new parking system in partnership with Flowbird, the world’s leader in curbside management and urban mobility solutions. The system replaces the Town’s legacy multi-bay meters and its gated off-street systems, providing better ease of use, more functionality, and stronger reporting capability.

At the end of 2016, the Town tested four Strada Pay Stations to ensure reliability and good service. Following the successful trial, Flowbird was awarded the project to enhance the parking systems both on and off-street in Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill’s Town Council selected Flowbird’s Strada for the following features:

• Technology Opportunities - Supports multiple payment options and on-screen messaging features.
• Design and Appearance - Solar powered pay stations that include a wide color screen that displays animated pictograms, vivid pictures and clear wording.
• Security Features – Robust protection mechanisms that meet banking requirements.

More than 60 new Strada kiosks have been installed by Flowbird’s North Carolina based distribution partner, Southern Time, on-street throughout downtown and off-street in all Town managed public parking facilities. In addition to accepting payments by coin or credit card, the kiosks also accept validation codes which are created electronically in Flowbird’s Smartcenter back-office system and dispersed through the local merchants.

All on and off-street transactions – coin, card, validation code, and mobile payment – are transmitted in real-time to Flowbird’s Smartcenter web based enforcement module. The status of each space (paid, unpaid or grace period) is easily accessible by parking enforcement officers on wireless devices.

“I’m extremely pleased that the Town put its trust in our team to deliver a solution that impacts so many people in downtown Chapel Hill,” said Benoit Reliquet, President of Flowbird North America. “The solution we’ve deployed there demonstrates the flexibility of our system by managing on-street and off-street parking payments along with merchant validations in one integrated platform.”

The Town of Chapel Hill used the kiosk installation as a launching point for their ‘Lots to Love’ campaign to change the perception that parking is no longer hard to find or inconvenient. The campaign, in coordination with downtown merchants and business groups, aims to educate about the new parking system and more opportunities for parking downtown. Check out this unique way to promote downtown parking at www.parkonthehill.com/lots-to-love.

About Flowbird

Parkeon and Cale have merged to create Flowbird, the world’s leading parking services, and urban mobility company.

The name Flowbird expresses the innate ability of birds to navigate individually within crowded spaces; mirroring the benefits for people of the intelligent parking and multi-modal systems developed for towns and cities by Parkeon and Cale.

Flowbird’s group resources include 500 R&D engineers working on behalf of customers to push the boundaries of innovation in transportation hardware, software, sensor systems, machine-learning and AI, information security and mobile development.