In the past 100 years, parking has evolved dramatically from simply trying to find space between painted lines into a vital, lucrative industry. Technology is now more important than ever to manage parking inventory, accept payments, and promote your facilities to drivers. By using the latest parking technologies, you'll be able to improve customer experience while simultaneously increasing efficiency and revenues.

1. Parking Apps & Search Engines

Drivers can easily find parking through the devices they already use like parking apps and Waze on smartphones, and through popular search engines. Using the power of the cloud, parking operations managers can quickly communicate parking availability, rate changes or other information to customers. The technology helps simplify the process of looking for a good spot, and improves the experience for everyone.

2. Digital Payments & Parking Reservations

Today's digital payment tools allow customers to make reservations and pay for parking ahead of time, ensuring a spot when they get to your lot and avoiding some of the possible problems like lost tickets or temperamental machines. In addition, the tools that analyze digital payment data can help determine the best parking rates to attract customers during certain times of the day. They can help you identify what times peak occupancy in your lots occurs, and the impact of raising or lowering rates. With new payment technology, you can make changes quickly using up-to-the-minute data to get the best price and maintain ideal occupancy.

3. Real-Time Occupancy Information

Access to big data from multiple resources (connected cars, instrumentation, predictive algorithms, etc.) can be used to monitor current occupancy levels and analyze utilization trends. For instance, the data can give parking operations managers the ability to observe lot occupancy in real-time, and make adjustments that can ease crowding in one lot and move drivers to a lot with more available parking. This information helps you make real-time informed data-driven decisions that optimize your parking resources and keeps the parking experience as seamless as possible.

4. Management Platforms

Managing parking inventory isn't done at the parking lot level. Rather, a parking operations manager is often in an office removed from the location of the lots. You may not personally be aware of new construction or events, and how they could impact your lots. But, with today's parking technology – including data feeds that alert you to those impacts – you can have oversight of your whole parking system through your PC, allowing you to react quickly to what's going on and make changes. These online management and reporting tools let parking operations managers update their parking inventory or rate changes in the cloud and communicate that information to drivers instantly.

5. Connected Car Navigation Systems

Experts predict there will be more than 250 million connected cars on the road by 2020; in-car navigation isn't just for luxury automobiles any more. The in-car navigation systems constantly send road and parking data to the cloud which, when combined with other data, gives parking operations managers visibility to the most current situations in their parking systems. Drivers of connected cars can find, reserve and pay for parking before they get to the lot which can relieve traffic congestion and end the frustration of circling looking for parking. Smart operators know that connected cars provide opportunities to upsell parking packages and increase profits.

Parking managers can't be everywhere at once. When an operation includes multiple lots, special permits, allocated VIP or valet parking, having the latest technology on hand helps make the management of inventory easier, provides opportunities to increase revenue and keeps your customers happy.

As you can see, all of the leading parking technologies depend on big data and the real-time nature of the cloud to provide the best in parking solutions. This common thread between all technologies implies that organizations taking advantage of data- and cloud-based parking platforms can provide a better parking experience for customers, and gain the revenue and productivity gains that come with such efficiencies.

Share Article

Who is INRIX?

INRIX is the leading provider of real-time, historical and predictive traffic information with widespread XD and TMC coverage across the U.S. INRIX collects anonymous, real-time GPS data from more than 300 million connected vehicles and devices globally. With real-time information on more than five million miles of road in 45 countries, INRIX is the preferred provider of driving intelligence for leading automakers and transportation agencies.

With the INRIX Digital Parking Network, you have access to the largest distribution network to help promote your parking locations to millions of drivers. INRIX combines data from 300+ million connected devices with proprietary predictive algorithms and exclusive access to massive amounts of data. We work with you to incorporate your own data with ours to calculate your parking availability information; no additional hardware is required.