However integral, these intelligent parking systems are nothing without the maintenance systems behind them. This is where a good comprehensive maintenance plan comes into play.

Stop problems in their tracks with great preventive measures

Prevention is better than the cure. This ideal rings true here at Duncan Solutions as we believe great preventive measures are a core component to any solid maintenance plan.

Undergoing extensive training on procedures and reports are just two examples of the preventive measures we put in place. Both help councils, city planners and enforcement teams stay on top of operations – ensuring bigger potential problems are kept at bay.

Doing so, teams can reap the following benefits:

1. Increased productivity: When everyone is trained on the operations of a product/service and said product/service is analysed frequently, glitches should become a rare occurrence. This improves productivity and saves on time and financial resources.
2. Lowered maintenance costs: By catching a problem at an early stage, teams can stop an issue from transforming into a giant repair headache and therefore save on costs.
3. The increased lifespan of equipment: Spending quality time understanding and looking after your equipment can add valuable time to its lifespan.

Deal with problems quickly and effectively by being reactive

Sometimes problems rear their head, but thankfully, we have the processes in place to ensure such issues are dealt with quickly and effectively. One of these is our 24/7 customer service offering. For example, if a problem with a parking machine arises, our skilled operators will receive a real-time notification within 30 minutes alerting them to the issue – whether on-street or off-street. This means we get on top of potential issues before they have the chance to evolve into harder-to-control, costly problems.

Other core components of our reactive maintenance plan include:

• Graffiti removal.
• Cleaning and maintaining parking machine externals.
• Provision of information for the resolution of infringement disputes.
• Access to our Communications Management System – hosting and maintenance.
• Supply of spare parts and consumables.

By catching a problem at an early stage, teams can stop an issue from transforming into a giant repair and save on costs

How reports play a big role in comprehensive maintenance planning

To ensure maintenance and revenue KPIs are respected, smart cities should consult monthly data reports. These should cover the performance of the service, all maintenance activities undertaken for that month, complaints and customer concerns and any occupational safety and health (OSH) incidents.

The most consulted maintenance reports at Duncan Solutions include:

• The Asset Management Module: This allows users to effectively manage all aspects of their physical assets in the field. This could include error reporting, asset communications and performance.
• The Event Management Module: Here, users have access to a wide variety of system events and communications. This could include asset communications, diagnostic events and file download events.
• The Alarm Management Module: This report allows users to view current and historic alarms raised by field assets or the system. This ties seamlessly into our Field Maintenance System to allow for an efficient and effective management of asset maintenance by our qualified service technicians.

Following your parking assets in real time can help cities to do more accurate and reactive decisions

If you’re looking to enhance your smart city or see improvements to your current parking operations, start reaping the rewards of a solid maintenance plan. Get in touch with the team at Duncan Solutions today.

The post The importance of a solid comprehensive maintenance plan in parking appeared first on .

Here are three benefits that can help you overcome common hurdles:

Improve compliance, officer safety and comfort.

When using mobile licence plate technology (MLPR), enforcement officers and police forces can enjoy peace of mind in the field. Before, the only option was to patrol looking for non-compliant cars, with officers exposed to relentless bending and chalking, putting themselves at risk of repetitive strain injuries – not to mention massive inefficiency. Now, the PSO can spend the majority of their shifts inside enforcement vehicles that are mounted with a weather proof luggage box (POD) mounted on roof racks.

The Video Processing Unit (VPU) processes the mobile licence plate recognition results and displays these on an inboard, web-enabled tablet device. Officers monitor the device and are alerted to any vehicle detected as having parked for too long in a time restricted zone.  As a result, the time spent outdoors, in sometimes extreme conditions, is significantly reduced and work health and safety standards are increased.

Potential abuse and assault from disgruntled non-compliant drivers are a concern enforcement officers face on a daily basis. With the use of MLPR technology, officers have access to better real-time data, which includes LPR and colour context images, GPS coordinates and time/data stamps. This not only helps confirm reasons for giving infringements, but also helps cases hold up in a Court of Law. The safety of the vehicle also reduces the risk of attack that officers on the street may have faced before.

MLPR licence plate recognition technology can track up to 1000 plates per hour.

Enhance enforcement team efficiency

Through the use of mobile licence plate recognition cameras, management teams will notice a vast improvement in enforcement team’s efficiencies. The process is simple: switch the car on (it starts automatically), choose to enforce, choose to read plates, nominate left or right camera, drive.

Before, officers undertook time-consuming and labour-intensive walking patrols to look for non-compliant vehicles. Now, the same officers simply rely on real-time updates of only those cars that have overstayed. This eliminates the need to chalk every car. Instead, the MLPR cameras help officers review more parked cars than ever before.

Better yet, when using an MLPR-mounted car, a route which took the best part of a day was covered in 45 minutes. Such technology has the ability to track 1,000 plates per hour, which would usually require four to five rangers over an eight-hour period. This allows management teams to deploy existing staff efficiently on the different areas – or deal with other law enforcement issues – and collect data from a wider pool of bays and vehicles.

When using an MLPR-mounted car, a route which took the best part of a day was covered in 45 minutes.

Increase compliance and accuracy 

A configurable combination of Duncan’s sensors and MLPR capture systems offers unparalleled benefits when it comes to compliance and accuracy. One of the main benefits is how quickly and effectively these systems have changed bad parking habits.

City planners can now analyse the motorist and citizens behaviours and adapt and visualise the best infrastructures to facilitate the traffic and safety of all.

The mobile licence plate recognition is a preferred method as it has the advantage to sneak in every single hidden street with or without sensors or fixed cameras.  Fixed cameras cannot always cover all angles and are not as subtle. With MLPR, there are no constraints of infrastructure, structures, angles etc, the camera can be angled to capture parallel, 45°, 60° and 90° angle parking.

A configurable combination of automatic LPR and manual capture options means that more plates can be ‘marked’ over any given period, whilst maintaining the highest licence plate accuracy in the smart parking industry.

By using Duncan Solutions’ mobile licence plate recognition cameras, one of our councils was able to decrease the number of illegal school drop-offs/pick-ups. Council staff driving MLPR-mounted cars were able to pass through several school zones and capture offending vehicles and their licence plates (up to 60 photos within a second).

At the end of the shift, this data was processed and parking infringements sent to non-compliant vehicles that may have once gotten away with offending. As a result, the council found that compliance rates were dramatically improved.

Another good point the council noticed is the fact that the car is subtler than officers walking on the street.  It gives the public less opportunity to create dangerous situations.

MLPR cameras possess fantastic to-the-centimetre GPS accuracy – one of the highest in the industry and one with a successful read rate at up to 50 km/h. Better yet, councils using older systems have seen an increase in accuracy when switching to Duncan’s MLPR. What was once only 50 per cent on average, accuracy rates now average at 85 per cent.

Results show compliance climbs dramatically after only a few months of regular MLPR enforcement which boosts paid-parking revenue. However, infringement revenue often remains higher in areas where large numbers of transient parkers continue to infringe.

If you’re ready to see how mobile licence plate recognition (MLPR) cameras can improve your city’s parking operations, get in touch with the team at Duncan Solutions today.

The post Three benefits of mobile licence plate recognition for parking enforcement appeared first on .

Over the years, the parking industry has welcomed tremendous technological advancements. One of the most important? Vehicle detection sensors.

By working harmoniously alongside our trusted parking enterprise management system PEMS, intelligent parking sensors offer a more efficient way of managing car parks in a way that benefits cities’ infrastructure and improves traffic safety.

How sensors improve the lives of… motorists

Vehicle detection sensors’ main purpose is to highlight available parking spaces quickly. How does it work? The in-ground sensors buried in each determined park space send data to management platforms, capable to analyse the data and forward it via APIs with pay by phone mobile applications.

Prompts from the applications direct the user to the available locations safely. This stops drivers from spending time circling the area in search of a park, which in turn reduces traffic congestion and the stress that goes with it.

Another great advantage is that it allows the motorist to pay for time up-front, or set the ‘meter’ and pay for what they have used at the end – all without having to go back to the parking spot.

Any Pay-by-Phone application can be integrated into our open and scalable parking enterprise management system PEMS.

Drivers can receive real-time updates to find the nearest available park.

How sensors improve the lives of… enforcement teams

Before the introduction of advanced intelligent parking technology, chalking of tyres was one of the only ways enforcement officers could monitor parking overstay activity. However, not only was this method inaccurate, it was also physically demanding and time-consuming, as officers had no sure clue as to which cars were non-compliant and which were.

Thankfully, the vehicle detection sensors (in accordance with an innovative management system such as PEMS) allows officers to follow real-time and accurate data updates. Once a car enters a sensor-fitted parking space, occupancy data is transmitted to the PEMS system where it is processed and made readily accessible to officers via their handheld devices.

Now, those in the field no longer have to check every vehicle on site to decipher whether infringements are needed. Instead, officers can make their way directly to non-compliant cars that are shown on the AutoISSUE application. This direct enforcement methodology significantly improves officers’ efficiency through the elimination of unproductive patrolling. Furthermore, they’re able to capture approximately 20-30 per cent more offences than is possible in standard old deployment.

Vehicle detection sensors can reveal trends that can better shape your smart city structure.

Duncan vehicle detection sensors can display all current overstay events on multiple handsets so that officers’ patrolling “two-up” can divide the work of processing a series of nearby overstay events evenly between them. In contrast, other in-ground sensor system overstay events can only be displayed on a single handset. This can leave one officer in a two-up patrol having all in-range overstay events being displayed on his or her handset while the other officer has none. As a result, officers using Duncan sensors can process overstay events much more efficiently than officers using other in-ground sensor systems.

How sensors improve the lives of…councils and management

As well as supporting ‘smart city’ strategies, the sensor and PEMS’ dynamic wayfinding guidance technology also bolsters legal evidence during court hearings. With a low latency, (99 per cent of events communicated to PEMS within 30 seconds), a 99 per cent vehicle detection accuracy (the highest on the market) and comprehensive records easy to export, Australian councils using the sensors to write infringements, have experienced a less than 0.006% error rate, and significantly, no cases of unsuccessful court prosecutions.

Management teams can also feel reassured that officers in the field will feel more comfortable whilst on the job. Before, staff didn’t have accurate evidence to refer to when issuing infringement notices and were susceptible to abuse and assault from non-compliant drivers. Now, that worry is diminished, as officers have the clearest idea of whether to write a ticket or not, and have real-time information to help them decide – improving fairness for all involved.

Where motorists are concerned, councils will see a significant improvement in traffic congestion – especially in busier urban areas. With less circling looking for free parking spots, streets are safer for pedestrians. Motorists can now spend more time visiting local businesses, which increases turnover and contributes to the overall infrastructure of the area.

So far, Duncan Solutions has thousands of installed sensors around Australia. After assessing how our sensors were working for one of our trusted clients, we discovered that 50 per cent of the violations lasted more than 30 minutes. This demonstrates the need for sensors and PEMS. Thanks to notifications pointing officers to non-compliant cars, fairness can be applied to all.

Want to find out more? Get in touch with the team today and request a demo.

The post How do intelligent parking sensors improve efficiency and fairness? appeared first on .

In a smart city, convenience is everything. By automating the most labour-intensive or tedious work for both enterprises and consumers, we can create metropolitan areas that truly thrive. And what’s more tedious than having to pay for parking with cash?

Research from Colmar Brunton indicates that only one in five Australians prefer cash over other methods of payment. Meanwhile, Visa says consumers could save eight hours a year just by paying without cash.

With better security, improved record keeping and the utmost convenience, the move towards a cashless society is steady and profound – and parking operators need to take notice.

Smart cities need to adapt to changing payment trends.

Cashless parking: By the numbers

Across the payment terminals that Duncan Solutions has installed throughout Australia, there are some clear-cut consumer preferences.

PayWave

When Duncan Solutions implements PayWave capability in its parking terminals, we can see this form of payment account for up to 92 per cent of transactions, leaving fewer than 10 per cent made by cash.

This figure can fluctuate – for example, when tariffs are only $3, consumers will opt for cash up to 40 per cent of the time. But the higher the cost, the more prevalent PayWave becomes.

Pay by mobile

Pay by mobile affords consumers some convenience, but having to download a specific app to pay for parking has not had as much cut-through as PayWave. At our coin-only meters with a pay by mobile option, cash makes up about two-thirds of transactions.

Across all our payment terminals, pay by mobile tends to sit at around 7 per cent of total transactions.

Pay by mobile is a modern and convenient payment method to pay at parking machines.

Cash

Cash is on the decline, but still an important part of parking management. As noted above, lower tariffs attract more cash payments – perhaps because consumers are more likely to have $3 in coins. When tariffs sit at $12 and PayWave or pay by mobile are available, only 20 per cent of transactions are in cash.

Intelligent parking solutions are here to stay

The overarching trend is absolutely one of smart technology adoption. When PayWave is available as an option, commuters opt for it in a massive way – much more so than pay by mobile, and vastly more than cash.

The message is clear – consumers want convenience in their parking payment, and for the majority of Australians that means PayWave. People are already utilising the technology wherever they can, and it’s critical that operators take steps to provide those payment options.

Parking as part of a cashless society

The trends in parking payments are consistent with how Australia is evolving as a whole. In 2007, 67 per cent of Australian consumer payments were made in cash, according to the Reserve Bank, with 26 per cent made via cards (credit, charge, EFTPOS). Fast-forward to 2016, and those figures have nearly reversed, with 52 per cent made with cards and only 37 per cent in cash.

Duncan EMV certified contactless ‘tap & go’ card reader supports Visa PayWave, Mastercard, PayPass, ApplePay, AndroidPay and Google Pay applications.

This shift to cashless payments doesn’t just benefit consumers – it can spell out massive growth for enterprises who offer the right options. Research from Visa suggests that business in Sydney alone could reap $9.84 billion in direct net benefits if they continued to push cashless technology, largely through:

• Time saved during the payment process.
• Increased consumer bases (both online and in physical stores)
• Higher revenue growth.
• Reduced cash handling.

In Australia’s parking industry, those time and cost savings can translate into massive benefits. More efficient, intelligent parking solutions can help with vehicle turnover, make expiation payments much easier to complete, and ensure all transactions can be recorded in your comprehensive back-end management system.

Cash may have once been king, but the deposition is underway. To keep your parking operations up to speed with how Australians really want to pay, contact the team at Duncan Solutions.

The post How many Australians are paying for their parking digitally? appeared first on .

Intelligent parking solutions are the fulcrum of smart cities. Just take a look at projects underway from the Department of Infrastructure, Regional Development and Cities’ Smart Cities Program. Vehicle sensors, smart phone applications, back-end platforms – the government is rolling it all out, from Queanbeyan to Queensland’s Far North.

But it’s just the first step. With this kind of infrastructure in place and a comprehensive back-end system capable of capturing parking data, operators and councils can begin to truly revolutionise their cities. Here’s how.

1) Parking data can reshape the flow of traffic

Sensors, parking payment terminals and compliance devices all perform excellent individual functions, but the data they capture can do much more.

Take, for example, the problem of inner-city traffic. Research from Inrix suggests that U.S. drivers spend an average of 13 hours per year looking for paid parking, a figure which rises to a whopping 107 in busy metropolitan areas like New York. With similar results found in Germany, smart cities need a clear-cut solution to mitigate traffic flows seeking the nearest park.

Drivers can spend an incredibly long amount of time searching for their next park.

A strong back-end platform like Duncan Solutions’ Parking Enterprise Management System (PEMS) can aggregate data from all of your intelligent devices and synthesise this into a clear depiction of where parking spaces are available. Coupled with next-gen wayfinding technology, smart cities can minimise parking seekers’ impact on traffic by providing clarity on where spaces are.

2) Parking data can influence urban development

When your organisation can see exactly where people park and for how long, it can plan future developments with a more comprehensive view of how people commute.

The right data management can reshape a smart city’s future.

Consider the work Duncan Solutions did for Penrith Council last year. With a comprehensive sensor and back-end solution, the local government body could identify exact parking turnover in key areas. This allows for identification of high-demand parking zones, exactly what kind of infrastructure is needed and how much that might cost.

Similarly, under-utilised parking spaces could be slated for redevelopment or outlined as zones for stronger transport links. If you don’t know where people park, you don’t know where they’re going.

3) Parking data can drive smart city sustainability

Another topic we have recently delved into is the impact intelligent parking solutions can have on smart city sustainability. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report into the workplaces of 2030 identified four distinct business worlds, one of which was the green (or environmental).

How can parking technology and data help to drive sustainability?

This is a path many businesses are already on, where environmental awareness and social responsibility is an absolute imperative. A core element of this, PwC argues, is the ability to minimise environmental damage and protect scarce resources.

The overall efficiency (not to mention reduction in paper waste) that automated parking data and PEMS can introduce could prove essential for businesses on this journey. The ability to minimise menial labour, maximise digitisation of compliance and make consumer parking faster is only possible through better, cleaner data. That’s exactly what PEMS delivers.

Data drives the world – does it drive your organisation?

The information that smart cities need to evolve already exists – organisations just struggle to capture it in a meaningful way. Driver numbers, parking stay or wait times, non-compliance rates and total income: councils and operators can already get a sense of these figures.

But with a comprehensive platform like PEMS, there is no guesswork. You can draw upon all the data you need, when you need it. That’s a level of information and power that operators simply hadn’t had before. And with that data comes a wealth of opportunities.

If you’re ready to let data help shape your city’s future, get in touch with the Duncan Solutions team today.

The post How parking data could shape the cities of the future appeared first on .

Smart cities are about more than just technological advancement.

Whenever a council implements new civic infrastructure, it does so to improve the sustainability and livability of its local government area. From the smallest rural towns to the most congested city centres, new systems (like Duncan’s parking technology) are improving everyone’s day-to-day lives.

The Australian Government has put a lot of work into encouraging change. Recent projects funded with Federal money include renewable energy generation, charging stations for electric cars and even using mapping technology to find cooler routes home for pedestrians and cyclists.

At Duncan Solutions, we’re thrilled to be part of the smart city revolution – here’s how our work adds to this sustainability focus from governmental, environmental and enterprise perspectives.

Parking technologies help reducing circling, traffic jams and pollution.

1) Back-end management for vehicles of the future

Our Parking Enterprise Management System (PEMS) is a comprehensive back-end managing and reporting system for Australian parking. It can integrate with a massive number of technologies and apps, from in-ground vehicle sensors to a council’s own information databases.

This level of integration is critical for the evolution of smart cities, particularly as vehicles evolve too. While electric and self-driving vehicles are yet to take off locally, their rise will undoubtedly come with in-car tech that can communicate with meters and sensors. By developing a future-proof system with strong integration capabilities, we ensure that councils can effectively engage with the fleet of the future.

2) Moving away from the paper trail

Traditional parking compliance teams deal in significant amounts of paper – a material that continues to be an issue for Australian waste. For example, Clean Up Australia’s annual survey found that paper rubbish increased by 3 per cent in 2017.

By adopting intelligent parking technology, councils can drastically reduce the amount of paper that goes into production. While many compliance teams use state-of-the-art Bluetooth printing devices for tickets, PEMS enables operators to issue digital tickets. We’re on the cutting edge with this, with recent projects seeing motorists avoid paper tickets altogether.

This extends to payment systems. Pay by phone applications mean that motorists can use Apple Pay, Android Pay and other digital wallets to minimise the circulation of cash and create a digital paper trail for all parking transactions.

3) Better corporate governance and insight

Sustainability goes beyond the environment – it includes the way businesses operate too. Smart spending, correct allocation of resources and understanding where employee’s efforts are concentrated (and if they are focused on labour-intensive work) is all part of improving sustainability from an operational perspective.

That all becomes possible with a system like PEMS. Parking information no longer sits in isolation, with tickets issued in a completely different system to your wayfinding or pay-by-plate data. Operators can see where cars park longest, where and when compliance teams issue the most tickets, and adjust workflows accordingly.

It’s sustainability from a big-picture perspective, and it’s made possible through smart parking technology.

4) Reduced inner-city congestion

Cars circling for parks, unsure of where the free spaces are, can be a significant contributor to congestion in metropolitan centres. But with Intelligent parking technology, operators can reduce this issue by a massive degree.

Real-time occupancy data can guide motorists to empty off-street parking spaces via on-street digital signage. This helps create better pedestrian and vehicle flows, which isn’t just good for business – it’s critical for busy public amenities like hospitals.

Faster routes to free parking spaces means less congestion, less stress, less traffic and a more sustainable city.

Improved transport infrastructure could increase business activities.

Building sustainable smart cities on strong foundations

Transport infrastructure is the backbone of any metropolitan centre – and as Australia embraces smart cities, parking technology will have an increasingly important role to play. From higher levels of public transport to the adoption of sustainable vehicles, parking systems like PEMS will continue to evolve, adapt to and integrate with incoming trends in Australian transport.

Core to this is flexibility and forward-thinking – two key tenets of the Duncan Solutions way of doing things. From sensors to systems, we’re looking at how our cities are becoming smarter and more sustainable, creating solutions to match.

If you’re ready to look forward with us, get in touch today.

The post How parking technology enhances smart cities’ sustainability appeared first on .

It’s a lot of moving parts, and we also need someone to keep those parts working. Our man for that job is Marten Cullity, Duncan Solutions’ product manager. Since coming into the role about two years ago, he has been an integral part of PEMS’ growth. Broadly, he is responsible for the ongoing development of PEMS, keeping it on the cutting edge of modern parking technology.

Specifically, that means change management, team support, training and creating innovation: it’s all in a days work for Marten. As a master of all trades, we think there’s no-one better to speak to about how PEMS has changed over the years and what his vision is for the future of parking.

As the way people drive and park evolves, so much the technology that facilitates it.

Giving PEMS purpose

“The rate of change in Australia’s parking industry is phenomenal,” Marten says. “Five years ago it was mostly field hardware – some sensors and handheld meters that resemble what we do today, but mostly siloed devices that couldn’t feed back information.”

“Now there is so much smart city technology out there. We make our own parking meters and handheld software, while others are doing amazing things with pay-by-phone tech, advanced vehicle bay sensors, and license plate recognition devices. The purpose of PEMS, the reason we got started and the reason we keep evolving, is to bring all of these together.”

“We’re integrators – and given that exponential rate of change, with new parking technology cropping up constantly, it’s a job that is never going to be finished. There’s always a new device we need to make communicate with the rest of an operator’s infrastructure.”

It’s a one-stop-shop ethos that means the product manager role is different every day. New code, new devices, new customers and new challenges – Marten’s ability to keep PEMS changing with the times keeps Duncan Solutions on the brink of tomorrow’s tech.

PEMS integrates all in-feld technology components in real time

The future of parking management

As councils embrace smart city technology, all kinds of information becomes available. Through platforms like PEMS, operators can harness that information, feed it to both their own and consumers’ devices, and give everybody a level of insight into the way cities work that has never been possible before.

Marten, however, believes PEMS can go even further.

“I think geographically-based reporting is the next step. It’s something we’re doing today, but are hoping to make much more widespread. Local government areas have such a huge land mass, being able to use mapping in conjunction with the data we already receive takes it to another level, giving people clear visualisations of where parking is available and how long they’d have to wait.”

GIS Mapping

“Then there’s our transactional occupancy engine. Most parking meters are smart now, they can transmit data straight to a database using PEMS, especially with the high market penetration of tap-to-pay cards. We want to take that data, and use it to paint a picture of available parking for consumers and enforcement teams.”

The sheer volume of information that PEMS processes is staggering, and part of Marten’s role is finding the most innovative and informative ways of using it. Mapping and integration opportunities are endless, and the platform is scalable.

From mapping technology to improved apps, PEMS already has an extraordinary ability to make cities better – there’s no telling how important it will be in the future.

The post Past, present and future: What will PEMS do next? appeared first on .

The rise of smart technology in our cities has necessitated widespread evaluation of civic infrastructure. Everything from traffic lights to park maintenance can be improved through the use of technology.

While much of the conversation around smart technology in parking management has focused on sensors and compliance methods, there’s another revolution happening at our parking meters.

The evolution of payment terminals in Australian parking

Since the mid-1990s, pay and display machines have been the go-to device for on-street parking in Australia. Most of you will be familiar with pay and display – it’s the simple system of paying for parking and receiving a printed ticket to prove you have paid. Today, Duncan’s MX/TX machines represent almost two thirds of all parking machines across the country.

Upgrading payment terminals can improve the way cities function.

But the move away from paper tickets is gathering pace. Data is driving the new smart city revolution, and the focus is turning to more complex, integrated parking management systems that have a myriad of components talking to one another, and transmit occupancy, turnover, available parking, and driver behaviour information to mobile apps and digital signs to assist in finding a park and reducing congestion.

Unfortunately, the old paper ticket doesn’t fit well into this brave new world, where the requirement is all about getting the driver to nominate a unique identifier for their payment – either a parking space, or their licence plate. Only these paperless ways of paying for parking enable the city to capture the sort of data that they can in turn provide to drivers for guidance, and send to officers to improve the compliance process and help increase turnover.

The good news is, Duncan makes it really easy to upgrade your old pay and display machine without ripping it out of the ground. Installing a new modular pay by space or pay and display kit only takes about 60 minutes per terminal, and is considerably cheaper than buying new machines.

Pay by bay parking machines

Pay by bay parking uses the parking space itself as the UI for a transaction. Sensors in the bay communicate with an upgraded TX machine, alerting the system when a car enters and exits. Upon payment for the space, the terminal can automatically track how much time is left before the parking expires, communicating this to both a parking officer and the driver through their mobile devices.

This smart technology gives drivers a more convenient parking experience – they can get reminders on how much time they have left, top up their parking via remote transaction, and receive guidance from the integrated system on which bays are free now or will be in the near future.

For compliance teams, using the bay as a UI instead of a paper ticket means greater efficiency. Officers can monitor parking spaces from anywhere, even their office or break room, and are guided only to those overstaying vehicles they need to action. With pay and display, they have to check tickets on every single vehicle.

Really clever strategies can also be introduced too – the meter/sensor can prevent top up if the car has stayed too long in the same bay, wipe inherited time, and implement dynamic pricing strategies to assist in increasing turnover.

Will your civic infrastructure benefit through improvements to payment terminals?

Pay by plate parking machines

The ethos behind pay by plate is similar to pay by bay – having the driver nominate a specific unique identifier that can be monitored more efficiently. Drivers enter their registration details, and can receive all the same conveniences as under a pay by space system.

Compliance teams can use licence plate recognition (LPR) technology on Council cars or on their mobile devices to scan vehicles in on-street bays, checking for payments and isolating illegally parked cars in a matter of seconds.

Both of these methodologies enable the compliance process to become far more efficient – greatly reducing staff exposure to chalking and checking every car for a ticket, come rain, hail or scorching heat.

In todays data driven world, old school paper tickets may be easy to purchase but they are certainly not ‘smart’.

To upgrade your Duncan pay and display terminals and bring them into line with intelligent parking strategies, get in touch with the team at Duncan Solutions.

The post The change in our streets – moving away from pay and display appeared first on .

Australia’s cities are transforming. Research from KPMG indicates that 80 per cent of participants at their recent smart cities event (which Duncan Solutions contributed to) had begun developing plans to improve the intelligence of their cities’ infrastructure.

This includes a promising one-quarter of respondents who were already managing pilot projects, or had implemented smart tech in their cities and communities. Projects include citywide WiFi, digital wayfinding and, of course, advancements in parking management. Technology has the capacity to improve everyone’s lives – today we’re going to look at three ways that will happen in 2018.

How will your civic infrastructure change with technological advancements?

1) Automation in parking

Parking is a big priority for the evolving smart city. KPMG’s survey ranked it as the fourth-highest priority for cities, behind WiFi, lighting and roads.

And with technology like Bluetooth devices, advanced parking sensors and integrated management systems proliferating throughout Australian cities, more and more civic bodies are discovering the cost and efficiency benefits of building smart parking. You can automate monitoring through the use of sensors, while an integrated back-end system means information can be transmitted from compliance teams to a centralised database (and then consumers) with the push of a button.

No more chalking cars, no more walking for hours and only identifying a handful of overstayers and more guidance and available spaces for consumers. Automation leads to increased efficiency and fairness, something we are excited to see a lot more of in Australia this year.

As technology improves, local governments and private operators can take advantage of the information that increased data capture and analysis can provide.

2) Environmental sensors

Sensors help smart cities in more than just parking. KPMG’s research highlighted positive results from the City of Geelong recently, where new environmental sensors were placed in areas across their CBD.

These sensors were used to trigger lighting, wayfinding technology and even activate WiFi when someone was nearby. It’s the kind of technology we traditionally associate with smart homes, which are configured to turn lights on or activate certain appliances based around our personal routines.

Environmental sensor technology can take this kind of tailored user experience out of the home and into the streets, making navigating a city easy.

3) Advanced street lighting

Street lights are more than a visual aid – they may well become the building block of a true Australian smart city.

A recent Gartner report noted that streetlamps can be the foundation for wide area network (WAN) systems, predicting that 10 per cent of smart cities will use the posts for this express purpose by 2020. The base level technology is already there – lamps have a small level of connectivity to measure power output and the status of the lighting.

Gartner’s paper argues that building a WAN from street lighting provides the framework for better video systems, and means future smart city projects may not need their own WAN. You could say it’s a WAN-WAN situation.

What kind of technology does your city need?

What do cities need to become smart?

These tech trends are exciting – they’re a window into the future of what our cities can become. But at a civic level, there can be massive roadblocks to getting these projects off the ground – evidenced in the 39 per cent of respondents to KPMG who remain in strategy development, and the 20 per cent who haven’t even started their smart city journey at all.

Problems can be budgetary, bureaucratic or simply due to a fear of the unknown. However, the building blocks for any smart city project are there. We would recommend:

• Using the Australian Smart Cities Council, established specifically to assist with such projects.
• Consult and work with companies well-versed in smart city technology, like Duncan Solutions (a contributor to KPMG’s smart cities event).
• Engage your stakeholders. Build smart city strategies around what your constituents need, not just what technology is available.

Everywhere you look, there’s an opportunity to adopt smart technology to improve quality of life. To make sure it’s done right, especially around your parking management and wayfinding, talk to the team at Duncan Solutions.

The post 3 key smart city trends for Australia in 2018 appeared first on .

Accurate, real-time mapping is the future of smart cities, and this is particularly relevant where vehicles are concerned. Think Google Traffic – constant updates based on mobile data that tell road users exactly where congestion is, how long it will take to get from A to B, and even live crash or emergency information. Smart Australian cities can implement similar technology to augment the driver experience when it comes to parking.

Combined on- and off-street parking guidance is only just arriving in Australia, and will introduce massive benefits for both Councils, commercial operators, and most importantly, drivers.

What technology do operators need to combine on-street and off-street parking guidance?

The historic parking guidance problems

In the past, almost all on-street and off-street parking operations were managed in separate silos. The off-street environment is typically managed by a council or private operator, and boom-gates are used to manage the entry/exit flows. Boom-gates with live data feeds could facilitate LED displays at the entry that show how many available spaces are in the parking complex, but this is not much help when the driver is a few streets away and desperately looking for a park.

Similarly, drivers have always had to turn into a road before discovering whether there are any available on-street spaces to park in. In today’s busy urban congestion, the answer is often ‘no’, and drivers can spend frustrating amounts of time circling to try and find that empty parking space.

How good would it be to provide drivers with the kind of ‘real-time, global parking information‘ they need – on-street or off-street. This is where accurate vehicle sensors and an open platform management system can help.

Building synthesised parking mapping in Australia

Over the last five years, the use of vehicle sensors for off-street parking guidance has grown exponentially. These systems directly allow drivers inside the building to know where parking is available, either via digital signage, or more recently on drivers’ mobile phones using an integrated application.

Mobile applications can now display comprehensive off-street parking information.

Similarly, Councils have begun to roll out vehicle sensors in the street, where they have primarily been used to assist with enforcement, but are now increasingly used to provide parking availability via separate applications and LED signage.

But solutions that combine both on-street and off-street parking availability to provide a ‘precinct-wide overview’ are few and far between.

Thankfully, this has begun to change. Vehicle sensor accuracy, accessibility of real-time parking information, improved mapping technology and communications on smartphones, more affordable digital signage and better partnerships between public and private operations have resulted in the ability to synthesise on- and off-street parking availability data – and present it across a single network of signs and applications.

It’s a revolution for inner-city drivers that will speed up the act of finding a park, and will reduce traffic congestion at the same time.

Can you benefit from on- and off-street parking?

A recent system launched in Santa Monica and the emergence of mobile applications in Australia show how useful it is to combine multiple sets of real-time parking availability data. Synthesising multiple operators’ parking information is the key to present drivers with a comprehensive top-down view of where parking is available across cities in a way that single operators can’t do with their own information. It’s convenient, it’s accessible and it’s all encompassing.

The technologies for both on-street and off-street parking must be accurate, and must feed to an open platform management system. Experienced parking solution providers like Duncan facilitate precinct guidance via their parking sensors and Parking Enterprise Management System.

This kind of collaboration is what smart cities are built on. Integrated systems that can all communicate with one another, sending and displaying information that benefits everyone who can access it. With Duncan Solutions by your side, you’ll be well on the way to achieving this.

The post On- and off-street guidance: The perfect system for smart cities appeared first on .