Digitizing The Parking Space: The Importance Of Safe Parking Solutions In The Current Scenario

Amit Lakhotia Oct 03, 2020

One of the most common problems that car owners face today is the saturation of parking spaces. Vehicles, especially in metro cities, continue to outnumber existing parking spaces, thus clogging roads. On average, an individual in a big city spends 18-20 minutes searching for a safe parking space – causing unnecessary stress and fuel wastage. What’s even more concerning, is that 30% of traffic jams take place in cities because of parking issues. Additionally, safety issues in parking areas have also become relevant over the years.

As a quick solution to the existing problem, open and vacant plots are used as potential parking spaces and multi-level facilities are being built, irrespective of the limited land space in cities such as Delhi and Bengaluru. Thus, parking in Indian cities has remained a big problem.

The pandemic effect

Drivers were already facing these challenges, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, adding to their woes. The novel coronavirus has had a massive impact on all of us. It has completely changed our behavior and our freedom of movement. People are now skeptical to touch anything. Simple actions such as handling cash or pressing a button on a lift, once deemed normal, has changed as our focus shifts to safety and hygiene.

Now, as lockdown restrictions are eased with and malls, restaurants, and office buildings resuming operations, people are expecting a safe ambiance as they enter and exit any building. Therefore, the task of maintaining safety in these places becomes all the more challenging. Parking facilities/spaces are no exception.

Like other common areas, there are numerous touchpoints in a parking lot of a building where people frequently touch surfaces that may have been used by many other people, and on which the virus can live - potentially for several days. Therefore, considering these points, having access to safe parking spaces will become all the more important for drivers in the new normal era.

Choose a safe spot to park your car

In the age of COVID-19, one needs to be more vigilant in terms of picking a parking spot for his car. An ideal parking spot for your car would be a well-covered spot with a few cars parked at measurable distances. Furthermore, it is important to communicate with parkers about how to safely use parking facilities to remind parkers not to touch surfaces. Signs such as a 'red cross' indicating no parking zone are particularly useful. Leveraging technology, these signs can be automated and programmed with new, real-time messages that can be updated quickly in case the parking space saturates.

Contact-less parking

Taking safety and hygiene measures into consideration, zero contact parking solutions will play an important role in the post-COVID-19 era. For instance, app-based solutions providing functionality for the customer to search, navigate, access, and pay for parking directly from their smartphone will eliminate the high-touch parking experience. Likewise, parking pre-payment platforms, allowing drivers to reserve and pay for parking in advance will be an ideal way to deliver an immediate improvement to the parking experience. Such smart parking solutions are already provided by startups like Park+, which allows people to book parking spots like the would book movie tickets. Not only these solutions will save drivers time spent searching for a spot, but it will also reduce environmental degradation resulting from congestion caused by parking.

In the days to come, parking will become all the more important because of people’s propensity to prefer personal cars over public transportation in order to keep the social distance. Therefore, creating new parking spaces can be a daunting task given the sheer number of cars owned by people. Thus, several cities have already taken steps in implementing technology-based solutions that can optimize the use of available spaces for parking. Using sensors and software, smart parking solutions can provide both parking operators and drivers with a real-time map of available spaces in cities across the country. This will not just help individuals move beyond their daily parking woes, but also allow cities and authorities to manage urban development in a meticulously planned manner.