Don't get me wrong - I love our customers and it's a great treat to see them at conferences and tradeshows. I also enjoy speaking to potential customers, and understanding how our parking solutions solve their problems.
And yet walking the floor at Intertraffic last week as an attendee gave me the opportunity to learn and think more about the future of parking technology and the parking industry than I typically get at the shows in the US, where T2 is demonstrating our parking management system.
Our customers have come to rely on T2 for the cloud-based unified parking management system. Until recently that meant managing permits, parking enforcement, parking access and revenue control and event parking from one system. What will it mean tomorrow? Incorporating LPR (or as they call it in Europe ANPR - Automatic Number Plate Recognition) throughout your operation to "go permitless and gateless"? Expanding occupancy monitoring from off street facilities to on-street by adding sensors? Being able to seemlessly feed the handheld ticketwriter information from pay-by-space, pay-by-plate, pay-by-phone, transit fare collection and citywide ITS? Incorporating PDAs, phones and cars as access control credentials and payment methods? Going back to the future with barcodes and QR codes? Unifying parking and transportation into one system?
As a parking geek, I was practically giddy. For three days I could marvel at the new trends and technology for parking, as well as check the direction we've set at T2, to make sure we are going where the bigger world of parking and transportation is going. And now for the fun part - getting it done!
Recently, JVH reported in Parking Today blog on the challenges legacy parking revenue control system manufacturers face as parking continues to evolve:
"Technology is moving at light speed. The advent of electronic purses, the ability to pay with a near field communication (NFC) equipped smart phone, GPS and video enabled enforcement technology, QR code scanners in everyone’s hands, transaction based business models, “apps” that “run” parking garages, the marketplace is awash with startups and new technology that can leave customers and many legacy suppliers scratching their heads.’...You have to be very smart right now,” one supplier told me, “you are being forced to make a series of decisions and if one is the wrong one, you go down the wrong path, and there is no recovery. A lot of companies just don’t have the management expertise to handle this ‘state of flux.
We have seen the face of the parking industry change from cigar boxes to where we are today in 30 years. The next face we see is on the way, or perhaps already here."
Change is difficult to manage because sometimes it's difficult to see and even more difficult to respond to early enough. In order to be prepared for change in any industry, parking technology included, companies need to start before change is upon them. I am proud to say that T2 has been at the forefront of change in the parking industry.
We started our transition to a cloud parking system in 2003, rolling out T2 Flex in 2005. At the time SaaS was a relative unknown among users of parking solutions. Yet over the next few years we saw interest in parking in the cloud grow exponentially.
When PCI compliance became a significant issue for the parking industry, most PARCS providers achieved PA-DSS validation because this was a requirement to win current opportunities. So did T2. We also went a step further and achieved PCI-DSS level one compliance for our hosting environment in 2010—the first and only PARCS provider to attain this level of compliance. As a rusult, our customers benefit by shifting 80% of PCI compliance work to T2.
When we saw the emergence of new consumer parking solutions that deliver real-time information on parking availability, enable mobile payments for parking, online reservations, etc. we made sure T2 Flex is an open platform that can easily integrate with these solutions in real-time.
New technologies such as near field communication (NFC) equipped smart phones, GPS and video enabled enforcement technology, QR codes, etc. and these Parking 2.0 applications are changing the face of parking management. It is our responsibility as a parking systems manufacturer to stay relevant and continue to provide value to our customers.
With close to 400 customers in North America, T2 is no longer the new kid on the block of parking technology. We've grown up, and as a grown-up company we must anticipate and prepare appropriately for change - our customers expect no less of us.
State of flux? More like state of Flex, in my opinion.
One of the cool features of the Canadian Parking Association annual conference is Lunch with a Parking Doctor, where delegates come with their parking management ailments and get a prescription for the cure from experienced professionals in the parking business. Sounds, great, doesn't it?
Since I have never managed a parking operation, and since my primary goal at the Conference is to meet with T2 customers and others in the industry to learn about trends and needs in parking enforcement, permit management, acess and revenue control and event parking, I am typically the patient at these lunches. But not this year.
I was summoned to one of the tables by CPA's Sandra Smith and given a patient to consult with. To be honest, I did suffer a short moment of panic (did I mention I had never run a parking operation?). But then I summoned all the knowledge I had gained over the years from my friends and customers who run some of the most advanced parking operations in North America, took a deep breath, and started the consultation.
The patients were quite new to parking and I actually was able to provide them with reasonable recommendations. Their need was to increase revenue from a downtown garage in close proximity to an arena that was only used for monthly parkers. Here was my prescription:
1) Implement a Parking Access and Revenue Control System, collect and analyze occupancy by different groups (residents, employees, etc.) by time of day and day of the week. Then allocate identified open capacity to transient parkers. 2) Make the building security card the parking credential for Parking Access Control.
3) Use the relationship with the arena management group to start pre-selling parking online when patrons buy event tickets, to drive event parking customers to your facility.
4) Offer online coupons to parkers to attract them to your facility.
If you have other ideas please send them to me and I will share with my patients during the next consultation.
Did you think I meant green as in dollar bills? Of course parking makes money, anywhere from $25-30 billion a year in the US alone. But that is not what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about the other green - reducing the impact of our every day activities on the environment.
Parking technology makes green by reducing vehicular emissions. How? Here's an example provided by Chuck Reedstrom of Kimley-Horn in a recent presentation: replacing human cashiers with Pay-on-Foot machines in a multi-lane facility, combined with way finding, resulted in close to 70% reduction in vehicular emissions, as there were no more cars idling in line waiting to pay for parking or circling in search of an available space. This is very green.
And in addition, as those with experience operating parking facilities would attest, it may have also made green - dollars that is - by reducing involuntary profit sharing.
Parking and transportation demand management (TDM) go hand in hand. In fact, both disciplines are often managed by the same group of people in a university parking and transportation department or municipal parking authority. And this year, for the first time, IPI and ACT - Association for Commuter Transportation - joined forces to present a day long joint summit.
Most of the discussion centered on parking management systems and strategies that promote use of alternative transportation, reduction of mandatory parking requirements for developers, and improving the customer's experience during multimodal trips - when they drive part of the way and then park and ride public transit.
I was particularly interested in understanding what T2 Systems, as a parking management system provider, can do to support these TDM initiatives, and the speakers delivered. Lots of ideas for smart people at T2 to think about. One in particular sticks out: how can a parking system support the concept of shared parking? If anyone has ideas, please send them to me.
Oh, and in keeping with the spirit of the conference, I took Megabus from Indianapolis to Chicago instead of driving my car.
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