A sleepy Yorkshire town fabled for its spa water and RHS garden might not be the first place you’d look for technological innovations, but Harrogate is redefining protocol. The North Yorkshire town is to become the country’s first “smart parking town” when its digital parking system rolls out on November 1.
Drivers will now have the option to pay for the exact time they are parked for and will also be notified of, and guided to, available Parking spaces across the town centre.
The technology is underpinned by a network of 1,600 surface-mounted BlueTooth sensors that monitor how long a vehicle is stationary for within the bay. The sensors will be in place in all town street parking bays and off-street surface level car parks.
Motorists will have the option of paying by the hour, but those that download the AppyParking phone app will be charged for the exact duration that their vehicle stays in the smart parking bay.
“According to research conducted by the British Parking Association, the average time motorists spend looking for a space is 5.9 minutes, adding up to a total of 90.5 hours – or four days – spent searching for a parking spot over a year.”
A £200,000 investment, the rollout of Harrogate’s smart parking facilities has been funded by AppyParking and Visa.
Smart Parking: The Future of Traffic Congestion Management?
Smart parking is a technology that has the potential to save drivers both money and time, optimising usage and improving the efficiency of sourcing and managing parking spaces across public areas.
As towns and cities continue to grow, local councils and stakeholders are increasingly turning towards technological innovations to ease the burdens of an expanding population, from traffic congestion and air pollution to sustainable housing and publicly available connectivity.
Smart parking is just one such development, with the technology helping to alleviate congestion and parking demand, whilst also providing councils with interesting analytics and data on parking demand within their population centre.
Smart parking has been implemented in a number of forms across the UK, but Harrogate will represent the first time a full system has been introduced town-centre-wide.
Harrogate’s smart parking system goes live on November 1, with the AppyParking app available for download on iOS and Android mobile devices.
Get In Touch
Whether you’re a local authority looking to provide public WiFi or seeking a connectivity solution for Smart Cities, the IoT or 5G / Small Cells in your town or city, or if you are interested in partnering with us around the Connected City Platform in any of our forthcoming town and city roll-outs, we’d love to explain more about who we are and what we do.
Related Posts
- Data-Driven Innovation at the heart of Edinburgh’s quest to become European Data Capital
- Smart City Financing: Challenges and Opportunities
- Winning Public Support For Smart City Projects: What, Why, and How
- Can Smart Cities save lives? The connected emergency services & security revolution
- Can Smart City technology supercharge economic development in urban areas?
The post Harrogate becomes the UK’s first “Smart Parking” town appeared first on intechnologyWiFi.
This post first appeared on The Fibre: Blog And WiFi News Updates | Intechnolo, please read the originial post: here
