parking
High impact innovation often takes place in those areas that are directly related to our most basic, often unconscious, actions or needs. Take parking for example: we have a vehicle which we need to ‘get out of’ or ‘put/leave somewhere’ for a while while we do something else. Parking is inherent to our concept of mobility as it is nowadays. As long as mainstream ‘wearable’ transport is still limited to our feet, we’ll need to find gentle solutions to the ‘problem’ of parking. Innovation is taking place, yet adoption of innovative, advantageous solutions can sometimes be slow and not only because of pricing. Innovation of the parking experience is taking place on different levels, from different perspectives.
In Antwerp and several other cities people can pay their parking fees by mobile phone: an SMS with your license plate number when your park, an SMS when you leave, simple as that. Other options include an electronic device with prepaid cards that serves as a parking ticket, hence no more need to rush to parking ticket dispensers.
You can park, cars can park themselves (some nearly, some fully), e.g. Lexus, Toyota , etc., yet parking space you need. Fully automated, robot-operated parking systems such as the new parking in Chinatown are no new idea. More than twenty years ago architect Duilio Tassinari for example designed a parking garage for the beautiful town of Asolo in northern Italy, employing a robotic parking system. Although highly efficient, aesthetically elegant in hiding the parking inside the hill on which the town is situated, a small spatial footprint and optimal space/parking space ratio, the innovative solution was never realized. In the meantime, congested and difficult to access areas especially in Europe and Asia are increasingly adopting robotic solutions. Not only public, also private parking solutions based upon the same spacesaving principles are available on the market (some even featuring hydraulic spiral systems requiring little to no electricity to operate).
Parking space is one problem, finding a spot if there’s no robot near to help, is another. Traffic guidance systems these days are no longer limited to guide people to the parking lots in their city, but also to an available spot within the parking lot (e.g. Brussels airport, Munich airport). Sensors monitor which spaces are occupied and which are vacant. Next generation systems allow drivers to book places online and use their GPS navigators to guide them straight to the vacant spot.
Truly innovative would perhaps be to redesign mobility as we know it – with all its advantages and pleasures – without the need to park.
BTW, the people over at SparkParking run a blog on the future of parking, titled ‘Parking 2.0‘.
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