Nedap: Santander, a role model for Smart Cities

Santander is the capital city of the Cantabria region on Spain’s north coast. With just about 176.000 citizens it is recognized as a role model for Smart Cities in Spain for implementing state-of-the-art technology to improve their urban services. The innovative city implemented a parking guidance solution based on Nedap’s parking sensors.

The City of Santander is member of RECI (Red Espanola de Ciudades Inteligentes), the Spanish Network of Smart Cities. The network consists of mayors, councilors and representatives of 65 Cities and established to share knowledge, experience and innovative concepts to improve the services and management of urban infrastructures. The network stimulates innovative projects to improve the management and quality of life in the modern city for citizens, retailers and visitors. These projects allow the industrial entrepreneurs a proof of concept for Smart City solutions based on state-of-the-art technology and IT infrastructures.

Parking guidance solution

Since 2013 the City of Santander has implemented a parking guidance solution based on Nedap wireless in-ground parking sensors SENSIT into their Smart City platform. This innovative project was executed by Everis Smart Services. Everis Group is part of the NTT DATA Corporation, a global IT services company that offers business solutions, strategy, development and maintenance of technological applications.

image source: Ander Gillenea/AFP

The Smartzone parking guidance solution contributes to reduce the stressful search for available parking spaces and optimizes to use the existing parking capacity. Less detours and optimized navigation also reduce pollution and contribute to a sustainable and cleaner city environment.

Innovative solutions

The municipality of Santander has always been recognized for its progressive attitude to adapt new innovative solutions and is a role model for Smart Cities. The mayor of Santander, who is also the president of RECI, D. Inigo de la Sema Hernaiz, emphasizes on these solutions and is proud that his city is recognized as the benchmark for Smart Cities in Spain and beyond.

The parking guidance solution is a perfect example of introducing new solutions in the RECI platform and allow Smart Cities in all parts of the world to share these positive experiences.

“The City of Santander has deployed this Smart City Parking solution since 2013 and meets all our expectations. Nedap’s parking sensors has proven that the investments pay back and give citizens value for money in terms of better services and a sustainable environment for living. It makes our city more attractive for visitors and increases the retailers businesses. Our consistent support on intelligent solutions has given the City of Santander a leading and role model position in Europe, which we can highly recommend to Smart Cities in other parts of the world,” says Iñigo de la Serna, mayor of Santander.

Nedap introduced the wireless network sensors SENSIT to the global parking and traffic industry in 2006 during Intertraffic in Amsterdam. The SENSIT system was awarded with the PARKING INNOVATION AWARD judged by an international jury of parking and traffic professionals. Since the market introduction, Nedap sensors have been deployed worldwide in various types of applications. The system differentiates itself with a marked unknown real-time data-transfer, extreme long battery lifetime and dual detection technology (magnetic and infrared). The dual detection technology allows a high accuracy for applications with non-delineated parking spaces and larger vehicles such as trucks and buses. Part of the Nedap solution is a web-based hosting service where the real-time occupancy status data is available for processing into third-party services.

Click to watch the interview at Intertraffic Amsterdam

Interview with Mr. Maarten Mijwaart, General Manager & Mr. Edwin Siemerink, SENSIT Proposition Manager, during Intertraffic Amsterdam 2016

Everis is a multinational consulting firm providing business and strategy solutions, application development, maintenance, and outsourcing services. Fernando Monzón, Manager at Everismart, states:

“Everis managed the deployment of Nedap´s parking sensors and the setup of the system. During this phase of the project, the Nedap cloud based management software proved to be a very useful and efficient tool, allowing for a seamless, fast deployment. Nedap´s wireless technology also contributed to an easy and trouble free maintenance of the system.”

ROI for Smart Cities

Local governments of Smart Cities benefit from Nedap’s dedicated Return On Investment (ROI) Calculator. The tool was developed by an independent traffic research and consultancy institute. It differentiates between hard and soft benefits. Hard benefits include e.g. additional parking revenues, enforcement cost reduction and reduced parking violations. The soft benefits include e.g. the reduction of search traffic (in km’s), CO2 and fine dust (PM10) emissions. The ROI Calculator enables the Smart Cities to specify parameters like region, currency, project time, number of parking spaces, enforcement and parking tariff, to create a dedicated case for the parking authorities. The SENSIT ROI calculator is developed for mid and large parking operations in congested cities, cities with local parking policy (enforcement, licenses, pay and display meters, blue zones, shop & go and retail areas, …).

About Nedap

Nedap is the leading specialist in systems for vehicle identification, vehicle detection and vehicle access control. Readers, sensors and controllers optimize, monitor and control vehicle flows. With SENSIT, Nedap helps cities to become smart about their mobility. Nedap Identification Systems, part of Nedap N.V., is headquartered in the Netherlands and has offices in Europe, US, Middle East and Southeast Asia. Nedap designs and develops intelligent, sustainable technological solutions for themes that are relevant to the modern society. It is Nedap’s ambition to offer ‘Technology that Matters’.