Consider all the uses that most drivers usually associate
with a parking garage:
1. Parking.
That’s about it.
Consider also, however, if one could deploy a smartphone or
another device not only to find the garage on a maps app but also to ensure
that on this rainy night a space is vacant and can be reserved. This is a good
thing, because next to the block-long parking facility is a concert hall, where
Billie Eilish will be performing in an hour. Need a ticket for the show? The
garage’s app can help with that, too. A dinner reservation? Sure.
اضافة اعلان
Just a parking garage? Inventive entrepreneurs conceive of
it as a “mobility hub” or “silo,” fashioned with whole lot of advanced software
and hardware technology around a mantra that goes something like this:
“Seamless, frictionless, touchless.” It’s a concept that has evolved in the
past year because of the pandemic, and it’s likely to keep evolving.
The owners of FlashParking, a company in Austin, Texas, that
provides software and hardware for garages, see the future of driving — and,
not coincidentally, parking — as a digitally centered platform that, in a very
broad (and rather utopian) sense, could relieve congestion, pollution, anxiety
and a few other things. Among their ideas is to move vehicles that do a lot of
cruising around or idling — like those on Uber shifts and
Amazon,
FedEx and
UPS trucks — into a restful parking spot in a “silo” equipped with a restroom and a
food truck.
“You only got to run in and deliver two packages?” asked
Flash’s marketing executive, Neil Golson. “I got a spot for 15 minutes, and
here’s a special price. That’s the evolution we’re enabling: Get people off the
street and into the lot.”
Flash’s CEO, Dan Sharplin, called parking today “an
accidental experience.”
“You’re driving in town to do something, and then looking
for parking,” he said. “But our view is there will be very few accidental
drivers in the future. And that these parking assets” — garages — “can be
converted into a dynamic hub of a broad network and connected in a digital
fashion through consumer-facing apps. It only works if you reach the consumer
where he lives today: on his phone.”
Sharplin’s organization, which he describes as SaaS —
software as a service — needs partners. In fact, Flash doesn’t own the garages
or the thousands of other parking locations across the country that it
supplies, he said.
“But,” Golson added, “we do own the infrastructure: the
hardware that makes the gates go up and down, the scooters, the EV charging
stations.”
And there are other partners in the mix: the automakers.
Flash is working with more than a dozen of them to integrate parking apps,
Golson said.
“But they’re not necessarily the ones creating the tech,” he
added. “We want to be at the table as the parking adviser, alongside Google and
Amazon and Uber.”
Many garages that SP Plus, a Chicago-based company, manages
employ hands-free systems at the gates and mobile payments “to create a
touchless experience,” said Jeff Eckerling, the company’s chief growth officer.
Overall, the company oversees “upwards of 2 million” parking spaces in several
thousand locations, including more than 70 airports, he said.
Despite the touchless technology, stay-at-home restrictions
that were mandated more than a year ago because of the coronavirus wreaked
havoc on the parking garage business. An empty parking spot is like a subway
car without riders, a baseball stadium without fans.
“Our whole industry was hit very hard, from hotels to
airports to event venues,” Eckerling said.
Some pieces of the Flash vision were in effect recently in
Hoboken, New Jersey, where the company has teamed with LAZ Parking at one of
its garages. High-tech cameras at the two entrances are programmed to read
license plates to identify cars whose drivers may have prepaid online, or have
a monthly residential contract, or want only an hourly ticket. (No need to pull
one from a machine; just wave at a screen and the ticket is dispensed.)
If the plate is obscured, the camera can recognize the car
by a “signature”: a mark or a dent or a sticker.
Part of the lower floor held some rental vehicles, since
Avis maintains an operation in the garage. (Many garages work with the
car-sharing company Zipcar and similar services to store vehicles and electric
scooters.) And a fairly large open space on the ground floor was “parked” with
a few dozen stationary bikes, part of a Soul Cycle franchise assembled like a
pop-up inside the garage.
One of the keys to a garage’s economic success is turnover.
“Managing inventory is critical here,” said Omar Perera,
general manager of the eight-story Hoboken garage and its 1,440 spots. “And
because the data is in the cloud, I can manage it from my iPhone in my house.”
Perera periodically adjusts pricing, depending on supply and
demand, he said.
There were no scooters or food trucks. And there weren’t
charging stations for electric vehicles yet, although Perera assured me that
they were coming. After one apparently desperate EV owner tried to charge his
car by plugging into a conventional AC outlet on an upstairs floor, the outlets
in the building were blocked. The garage of the future is still a work in
progress.
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