Burwood Brickworks and Smart Parking - Where Sustainability Meets Functionality

The much anticipated Burwood Brickworks complex has opened for business, and is already seeing visitors flock there to shop at over 40 specialty stores, visit one of the many restaurants, bars and cafés, watch a film at the 6 screen cinema, visit the urban farm or attend the medical centre or daycare facility.

Located in Melbourne, Australia, Burwood Brickworks is the world’s most sustainable shopping centre, and Smart Parking has been working with them to install a state of the art parking system that also ticks the boxes in terms of their sustainability policy.

The project’s target was to achieve a 6 star Green Star Design and As-Built rating, as well as full certification under the Living Building Challenge accreditation – in doing so they would become the first retail development in the world to achieve this internationally recognized certification.

Eliminating the use of ‘worse-in-class’ materials, as well as avoiding chemicals with the greatest impact to human and ecosystem health in the project, meant that Smart Parking had a long set of requirements and a material ‘red list’ to work through. We were able to provide a car park solution that not only met the sustainability requirements, but was also a viable working solution to managing the car park at Burwood Brickworks.

The installation in the basement car park included overhead indicators (OHIs) that serve as sensing units that detect when a car is parked in that bay, as well as being equipped with red and green LED lights that indicate to motorists whether each individual bay is occupied (red) or not (green).

The use of the OHI system is effective and also aligns itself with the sustainable nature of the project as it greatly reduces the action of cars circling the car park manually checking for a spot to park, saving both motorists’ time and pollution from car congestion.

In a further effort to help people quickly and easily find a bay we also installed cantilever and gantry LED signage that are placed strategically in the car park and display a higher-level view of occupancy, directing people to areas that have available bays and showing the number of available parking spots in each area.

The data on the LED signage is gathered by the OHI sensors and fed to the management platform, SmartCloud.

The parking information gathered from the OHI sensors is wirelessly fed to our cloud-based data management platform, SmartCloud. SmartCloud is a Google-powered, innovative IoT platform that processes information from the sensors in real time and feeds this information back to the LED signage just as quickly, meaning any information displayed is highly accurate.

As well as allowing the LED signage to function in real time, SmartCloud has a raft of features and benefits that the management of Burwood Brickworks can access with the touch of a button. By mining for data and generating reports, information such as car park occupancy, peak times, overstays and much more can be readily available to ensure informed, future-proof decisions can be made based on accurate data. As well, parking data can be overlaid with other data from the shopping centre, allowing greater visibility of the site as a whole.

About Smart Parking Limited 

Smart Parking Limited is a pioneering technology innovator and services company in the parking industry. With offices in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, along with a rapidly growing global network of expert partners, our aim is to bring our intelligent parking sensors and integrated smart parking services to the world. Each year, we install tens of thousands of sensors in a range of environments including shopping centres, supermarkets, airports, commercial parking sites, universities and large scale municipal street environments. To date, our advanced real-time vehicle parking sensor solution, known as SmartPark, has been adopted in 17 countries. Alongside the technology products division, our managed services division operates and manages thousands of car park spaces across the UK using complementary Automatic Number Plate Recognition/License Plate Recognition (ANPR/LPR) technology. This can be used as a single solution or with the option to be combined with Pay & Display or integrated with sensing technology. Smart Parking Limited has been an Australian Securities Exchange (ASX:SPZ) publicly listed company since early 2011.