Smart Parking

Smart parking technology is helping to solve parking problems in many large metro areas. By allowing drivers to quickly find vacant parking spots, smart parking solutions help eliminate driver frustration and minimize congestion by significantly reducing the number of cars circling city blocks as they look for open spaces.

But smart parking has many additional benefits that help improve quality of life for citizens and increase revenue for city governments. Additionally, smart parking meters, smart garages and airport smart parking systems create a city-wide, stress-free parking experience that makes cities seem more livable and keeps visitors coming back to stimulate the economy. A smart parking system can alert officials to parking violations, increasing revenue from parking enforcement. Additional revenue can be generated by turning parking spots over more frequently.

Benefits of smart parking systems also include:

• Improved air quality due to fewer vehicle emissions.
• Cashless payment systems that allow drivers to pay via mobile apps, reducing the cost of maintenance and coin collection.
• Increased revenue from dynamic pricing, where the cost of parking is higher for certain areas or certain times of day.
• More revenue for local businesses, thanks to easier parking for customers.

How smart parking technology works

Smart parking systems use a variety of technologies to identify and track parking availability.

• Smart parking IoT sensors and cameras that can identify the presence of a vehicle or an empty parking space.
• Network connections that transport data from the thousands or millions of sensors in an IoT parking system to a central data management platform.
• Data analytics that aggregate and analyze sensor data to produce valuable information.
• Interfaces that include alerts for parking enforcement, dashboards for city officials and digital signage that relays information about parking spaces to drivers.

Laying a foundation of connectivity for smart parking

The ability for smart parking technology to provide real-time information depends on a robust and reliable transport network and a variety of connectivity protocols, including wired, wireless and cellular. That’s why more smart cities today turn to Spectrum Enterprise for connectivity infrastructure to power smart parking systems and other smart city initiatives.

With more than 840,000 miles of fiber network infrastructure already in place and an additional investment of $25 billion planned before 2021, Spectrum Enterprise has the capacity and capabilities to deliver the foundation of connectivity that every smart city requires. Spectrum Enterprise offers:

• Connection speeds of up to 100 Gbps for local governments on a two-way, fully interactive digital network.
• Connection speeds up to 1 Gb for homes and businesses in the Spectrum Enterprise service area.
• Thousands of WiFi hotspots that will soon offer wireless connectivity at 1 Gbps.
• One of the nation’s largest LTE cellular networks, providing a wide range of connectivity options for smart city technology.

Learn more about Spectrum Smart Cities at www.spectrumsmartcities.com.