Christian Kloc juggles on stage at the January Meetup of Transportation Techies.
TDM TAKEAWAYTech tools are making it easier to balance parking and space needs.
Th
e January edition of Transportation Techies, titled “Autotopia,” focused on moving cars from A to B.
And a key theme of the night was: where exactly are we going to stash all these cars once they arrive at their destinations?
Parking garages along main thoroughfares can fill quickly, while garages down a back alley might remain empty because drivers aren’t aware of them.
Now, as several Techies illuminated, there’s an app – multiple apps – for that.
For Consumers: Using Technology to Find the Best Parking Deals
The Washington D.C. area’s homegrown app is Baltimore-based Parking Panda. Founded in 2011, the company created an app that allows users to reserve a parking spot in advance and pay the fee through the app or the website.
One of the biggest challenges was figuring out a payment- and parking-verification method that would work with the numerous types of systems, said James Bain, vice president of business development for Parking Panda. As a result, Parking Panda also offers a hardware system that attaches to the existing gate mechanism, allowing them to access their chosen parking garages with their phones. The company has now expanded to include more than 30 cities nationwide.
James Bain, Matthew George, and Nikola Ivanov at the Transportation Techies “Autotopia Night.”
Parking Panda also pursued partnerships with professional sports leagues, like the National Hockey League, and recently announced a new program with Amtrak to offer spaces at train stations.
Elan Mosbacher, marketing director for SpotHero, a Chicago-based company similar to Parking Panda, said the success of the app has led some of their partner garages to create their own, individual garage apps.
“The way that the world is going, any savvy garage owner is going to have a website or an app,” Mosbacher said. He likened the appeal of SpotHero to that of Expedia, which searches all airline company prices instead of just one via a branded site.
Both companies also see a lot of traffic via their webpages, where users can book in advance and print a confirmation or use license-plate verification, depending on the garage.
The competition for aggregator apps and websites is also growing. Browsing the app store, users can find Parkwise, Easypark, and Best Parking, among others, but Bain said he isn’t too worried about market saturation just yet.
“It’s certainly a nascent industry,” Bain said. “ It’s a little like an airline working with Expedia and Travelocity.”
For Economists: A Black Market for Parking or a Market-Adjusting Revelation?
A big element missing from these apps, however, is information about the availability of on-street parking.
Eric Meyer of Haystack
At the Techies event, Haystack Founder and CEO Eric Meyer explained that a user who is about to leave a parking space sends out a message via the app that their space is going to become available. Another user in the area looking for a spot can buy the spot for $3, guaranteeing that the previous spot occupant will wait until they arrive to vacate the spot. Usually, these are free parking spaces.
The app launched in the Canton neighborhood of Baltimore in early 2014 and the popularity was striking. It was also clear that the price of parking in downtown Baltimore was too low and consumers were more than willing to pay $3 – possibly more – to park.
While Baltimore tolerated this idea, other cities, notably Boston, worked quickly to pass legislation banning the use of the app. The crux of the problem, pointed out by an audience member, is that Haystack had essentially created a black market for parking.
Haystack removed its app from the app stores in November 2014, but Meyer said the company is in talks with a larger technology company to repackage the concept into something more palatable for cities.
For Cities: A New Data Tool to Track Parking Demand
While Haystack clashed, almost gleefully, with “backwards” city governments, California-based Streetline took a collaborative approach by identifying cities as their primary clients.
The founders of Streetline, Jim Reich, Todd Dykstra, and Mark Noworolski, came from a hardware background. Using two-step verification with a light and magnetometer, their device can detect when a spot is occupied and then transmit that information to a remote location. The data is transmitted in real time to app and web users via Streetline’s Parker and also stored for analysis on separate servers.
Because users can’t reserve an exact spot, Parker directs people to a certain block and notes how many spots are available in that area, the company’s Public Relations Manager Brittany Blasing explained in a phone call. The system is designed for use by city governments, large corporations, and universities.
The city of Los Angeles was the first client, but the hardware is now installed in 45 different areas worldwide. Even WMATA in Washington D.C. has gotten in on the act, using the technology to display real-time parking availability at the Rockville and Fort Totten metro stations. Blasing said the idea is that if drivers see that parking is available, they may opt to take the metro rather than drive all the way to their destination.
In the greater Washington area, WMATA uses Streetline’s technology at the Rockville and Fort Totten metro stations.
The wealth of data is also leading the city of Los Angeles to experiment with dynamic pricing which will push drivers toward less popular parking areas or encourage people to take public transportation at peak hours rather than paying the elevated fee.
With the proliferation of data from data-enabled cars and the widespread usage of cell phones, Streetline is moving more towards being a data company rather than a hardware company, Blasing said. However, nothing beats complete data, and with the hardware, that’s what they’ve got.
Have you used any of these apps? What would you like to see improved in the world of parking tech?
Photos by M.V. Jantzen