Smart Parking Landscape Changes with New Players, Enforcement

How many times have you been looking for a parking space in a traffic-plagued city and have wondered, how many people are in the same situation? Traffic is on many occasions caused by cars cruising for a parking spot. It depends on the region and the study, but on average, around 30% of traffic could be caused by people looking for a place to park. Which is why cities are turning to smart parking solutions. There are many different types of smart parking solutions: traditional in-ground sensors or Vision AI cameras that can help guide people to free spots, or even let municipalities know if someone hasn’t paid the parking fee. What motivates cities I think always a sustainable way. Cities have to become more green, more livable for all the inhabitants. You only have the possibility to go this way if you use data. There are a lot of, financial fiscal points that play an important role in this. So, at the end of the day, what matters is, what ends up in the city's treasury. If you really want to be sustainable, you also have to look at the finances side of things. We’ve seen the smart parking industry grow over the past few years. With projects deployed to guide drivers to free parking spaces, like the one we covered in the Polish city of Ostrow Wielkopolski, where 1000 in-ground parking sensors were installed to help drivers get to parking spots faster. We’ve also seen many projects in Park&Ride. However, we’re more and more seeing deployments linked to enforcement. Enforcement has become the main driver for smart parking solutions because of its ROI. The growth of the market will be driven by use cases related to enforcement. So I think the demand will go in that direction. They will look for a more automated detection of the fraud. Even automated billing potentially. And this is the direction of the market. In Australia, we are deploying a project in Hobart with our partner, ePark. and they are monitoring 2800 parking spaces. It's paying parking and this is pay by space. So they use our technology to enforce, to control, if the users are paying or not and to automate or, let's say improve the efficiency of the enforcement. And this is, a project where we are replacing previous technology deployed five, eight years ago. So it means they use the technology, they need to replace it because it's old, but it's a must. So it reflects that really smart parking technology is there to stay. Enforcement brings a lot of money to a city. According to Forbes, smart parking can increase the city’s revenue by 30%. San Francisco reported earning over $90 million from parking meters alone in a fiscal year. So considering that less than 10% of parking violations are fined... having smart parking can increase that and bring up the ROI. On one hand, when it comes to smart parking solutions, sensors per bay are between 200 and €300. Cameras cover more than one spot so that price can go down per parking spot, plus they can also keep track of license plates. On the other hand, knowing where people park and pay, will show where most of the infractions take place, allowing municipalities to deploy more collectors there and generate more fines. or even automate the process. In Brussels for example, where they use cameras mounted on cars to scan license plates of parked cars and see if payments have taken place, in the first 9 months of 2023 they had found 400,000 infractions, and on an average, an infraction is €25... The use of the smart solution led to enforcement revenue going from 28.5 million in 2019, to around 42.5 million in 2020, a 49% increase. However, despite smart parking being a solution that can have a good ROI in terms of sustainability and money, we’re still seeing smart parking start-ups struggle to take off and grow beyond 1 or 2 million euro revenues. My vision on the parking and smart parking segment is that this is still very fragmented. with companies with a lot of focus in a country or certain region around the world. And that's true that it's challenging to break this level. In our case, last year, we reached more than €3 million in terms of turnover. We expect to keep growing this year. We have not (only) to compete against other smart parking companies. We also have to compete against smart lighting, small rubbish, smart waste and so on. But we were founded seven years ago and we’ve digitized over 70,000 parking lots in Europe. It was a thing at a time. It was a real thing. Everybody tried to do it. The parking industry is probably not the fastest moving industry on Earth, and that doesn't help either. And disrupting the parking industry is potentially more difficult than disrupting other industries because you always have to do with concrete and steel. Smart parking solutions are often seen as a smart city component, so it needs to compete with other use cases and verticals that may seem more urgent and even with non smart city use cases. For example, a lot of cities are turning their streetlights to LED, because it’s something that will help them save a lot of money and resources, It is hard for any start up in the smart city industry because cities work slowly. But with smart parking, they face the difficulty of time as well as the fact that there are now new players: cellular data collectors and car manufacturers. They don’t rely on cities to gather data, they just gather data from smartphones or vehicles, like we saw in our mobility video. They skip any tender process and scale globally directly, gathering data that devices and vehicles are already generating, which they can sell to cities directly without needing installation. In parking, it's all about mobile sensors. We collect, park-in park-out events from millions of vehicles. We get movement data from millions and millions of vehicles. We use that information to create accurate, traffic information in terms of discovery. So where is parking? In terms of charging, because we know it's an EV and it was in a charging situation and it parked at that location. So by definition it's a charging location. Then we also have movement of vehicles in cities. and that reflects parking pressure growing, declining parking pressure etc.. So mobile sensors, the vehicles themselves will tell us what's happening in parking. Smart parking solutions have grown, but rather than growing due to its initial promise of improving congestion and freeing up streets of people looking for parking spots, it has grown due to enforcement and its clear ROI. For the future, the smart parking industry will need to look at its direct and new competitors, vehicle manufacturers and cellular data generators, who will have the advantage of gathering global data without the need of deploying any hardware or relying on cities. So smart parking vendors will most likely have to look at integration and partnerships with cities and these private companies that have erupted into the industry, changing its landscape.