Market overview
Facilitating parking in city centres is good for the local economy. If the political will is there it’s relatively easy to deploy smart parking systems and many authorities see them as the logical first step of large smart city projects.
The problem
Ten minutes searching for car parking several times daily means more than 240 hours per year, and an average of 700 complete days in your life. Driving around looking for an available car slot wastes fuel, produces anxiety, and increases pollution in city centres.
The players
Montpellier, a small French city having 270,000 inhabitants. Synox, a local company that has been involved in smart city projects since its foundation, is a customer of Libelium’s official distributor. Synox developed and deployed a smart parking solution for the authority using Libelium’s technology.
The solution
Montpellier’s shopping centre has limited parking slots and there are permanent traffic jams in some streets. The main goal of the project was to make traffic more fluid and increase rotation at parking spaces near the town hall and a shopping centre. Twenty smart parking nodes were installed by Synox in two different areas.
These devices were installed in the surface of the road on the parking areas for delivery services and for people with reduced mobility, with the aim to relieve congestion, streamline traffic, and improve access to car park areas. In the future, more people will benefit from this project since it is planned to enlarge the number of nodes.
In addition, sensors are employed to gather data about the temperature of the roadway, which will be used by the road authorities to take action when ice sheets are detected. Data management displays show real-time information on use of the car parking slots in order to improve the traffic conditions and diminish car parking search time.
Business benefits
- Private network employing LoRa technology will extend coverage for upcoming smart cities projects
- LoRa wide area antennas are easy to install at key locations
- “Open Data” approach facilitates the creation of new services by third parties
Jobs for the update
- Extend and expand the network in line with market developments
The author is freelance IoT writer, Bob Emmerson
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