Parquery Offers Insight on Smart City For Parking Talks

As part of our series investigating Smart Cities, we had the pleasure of hearing from Andrea Fossati, Co-Founder, and CEO of Parquery. Andrea shared his thoughts on how the parking industry can benefit from the rise in demand for Smart City solutions and gave us some examples of cities successfully integrating smart technology.

Can You Tell Us More about What Is Driving the Current Trend Towards Smart Cities, and How Do You Think They Will Evolve?

I have noticed a very clear trend in cities, to have more and more data, and of course, one such source of data is parking. It is very clear that real-time information on parking occupancy can have a big impact on traffic reduction, pollution reduction, and at the same time, improve the quality of life for drivers, who spend less time in their car and more time at their destination.

Of course, improving parking in the city will require investment from the city/municipality. We have seen that whilst technologies have been available for some time now, the cost of such technologies has been a barrier, especially for large scale deployments. Whereas, many small scale deployments have proven successful over the years.

Price has been one of the barriers, but now we are seeing a trend of data becoming available at a much more affordable cost. So we think that given this trend, more and more cities will begin working on connecting their parking spaces and parking lots to a centralized data source where real-time data can be made available to the drivers.

Can You Give Us Examples of Cities Which Deploy Smart City Technologies Well?

From our customers at least, there have been quite a few cities, particularly in Switzerland and Italy, where we are most active. Cities such as Montreux and Vevey, and in Italy for example, the cities of Desenzano del Garda and Andria have already deployed the Parquery solution, and so in some areas of these cities, it is already available for the driver. We think this is a good start because it shows the value of data to the city and the citizens, but of course, these cities are just a starting point, especially in terms of coverage of the solution.

We Heard from Ekin Technology That We Need More Technical Services before Smart City Parking Can Be Successful, Do You Agree?

In our opinion, cameras and video streams are a very valuable source of data for Smart Cities, not necessarily only for parking, but also for many other uses. One of the most interesting and important points here is that most cities already have a dense network of cameras, so these existing hardware should already be used to gather a lot more data. Of course from parking, but also traffic, of both vehicles and pedestrians and other areas.

How Do You Think That the Rise in Demand for Smart City Solutions Will Impact the Parking Industry?

It is a big opportunity because the market is huge, cities are of course countless, and many cities need data, this is becoming clearer and clearer. This will have a huge benefit to the parking industry because it will generate opportunities all across the globe. So beyond off-street, we believe that city parking, that is, on-street parking will be a big opportunity for the parking industry in the near future.

Given the Current Trend Towards Data-Driven Decision Making, What Can We Expect from Parquery in 2019?

Lately, we have had many more projects with the city administrations, so we can see that the awareness of Parquery as a cost-effective and easy to deploy solution is growing. At the same time, we are seeing more and more very large outdoor parking lots, which, up until now have been unable to afford real-time data, starting to feel that they can actually have data on the occupancy of the parking spaces with our technology.

For more insights from Andrea, and to see the contributions of Ekin Technology and Urbiotica, watch the video in full:

About Parquery AG 

Parquery AG is a leading technology provider in the field of Computer Vision and Deep Learning.

Visit us at https://parquery.com/ or contact us at info@parquery.com for more information regarding Smart Parking and other mobility solutions.