Advancing Sustainability Ltd specialises in smart cities, sustainability impact assessments in the ICT sector and circular economy metrics. It has customers across the public, private and third sectors and has worked for a number of cities, major multinationals and NGOs.

Recent work has included:

• strategies, roadmaps and economic assessments for smart cities;
• remanufacturing business models, recovery of rare metals and scrap electronics and circular economy metrics;
• sustainability impact assessments for satellite communications and undersea cables;
• privacy and freedom of expression: governments and the telecoms industry.

More information is available at Advancing Sustainability

Advancing Sustainability Ltd is a private limited liability company registered in England & Wales Number 8779804.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Data Landscape
3. The User Experience
3.1 Where can I park?
3.2 Is there a parking space?
4. Future Developments
4.1 In-car Navigation
4.2 Paying for a Space
4.3 Booking a Space
4.4 Links to the Retail Environment
5. Recommendations

1. Introduction

There is no doubt out-of-town shopping has had an impact on the traditional town centre. In part because out-of-town shopping centres generally provide easy to get to, large capacity, free parking with no time limits. Shoppers are attracted by the convenience of this hassle free approach that offers an overall much less stressful experience. On the other hand, town centre parking is scattered, often limited capacity, costly, with hefty fines for over-stay with access streets that are congested at busy times.

This paper asks if digital technology and the world of big data could transform town centre parking in ways that would attract people back into the high street.

First it investigates how open data can already help answer the following questions:

• Where can I park?
• Is there a parking space?

It then covers future developments with special reference to the high street and concludes with a set of recommendations.

Whilst the main focus of the paper is on the UK, it also includes some examples of international best practice. It addresses parking in public, open access car parks and on-street parking. It does not cover parking by private arrangement (eg https://www.parkatmyhouse.com/) or parking in dedicated car parks (eg at supermarkets, hospitals, etc.).

2. Data Landscape

A combination of the internet, smart mobile communications, low cost storage and cloud computing has created the environment for the collection of large-scale, commoditised data – otherwise known as Big Data. These data sets are often held in isolated systems that were never designed to “talk to” other data systems. This means their potential is never fully realised and has led to calls to make data more available.

Data which can be used, re-used and re-distributed freely by anyone is known as Open Data. For example, the Greater London Authority has opened up much of its data through the London Data Store. In some cases there may be a charge to access open data.

The most useful type of open data, at least from a big data perspective, are data that is easily readable by other computers using a standardised format through a piece of software known as an Application Programming Interface (API).

Data can be crudely categorised into either Static data or Real-Time data. Static data is fixed (or changes very rarely) such as the number of spaces in a car park, whereas real-time data is constantly changing such as the number of available spaces.

Some data starts its journey at a sensor ‐ for example an induction loop in the road at the entrance to a car park. Data can also be collected by people's smart phones and sent back to central servers. This often takes place automatically and in the background, and is known as crowd-sourced data. For example, much of the congestion related traffic data on Google maps has been crowd sourced from people's smart phones.

The totality of connected devices, including sensors, is often referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). Cisco estimate the number of connected devices exceeded the number of people on the planet in 2008 and will rise to 50 billion by 2020.

3. The User Experience

The availability of data and current applications in UK parking is now reviewed by walking through the user experience questions posed in the Introduction.

3.1 Where can I park?

The most complete source of static UK car park data is available as an XML file from the government's open data store. The extent of data about each car park varies, but generally includes the location co-ordinates of the car park and entrance/exit, car park name, locality and operator. The car park data is free and is made available under the Open Government Licence. The Code-Point® Open data associated with some car parks is also free and made available under Ordnance Survey OpenData™. The data is refreshed monthly taking account of feedback from users and operators.

The official interface for this data is Transport Direct. The data source is also used by a number of apps such as Parkopedia, the AA Parking app, etc.

In addition to the comprehensive national data sets, static parking information can also be obtained from many websites covering specific geographic areas (eg http://www.travelwest.info/car_parking) or from individual car park operators (eg http://www.ncp.co.uk/find-a-car-park). These websites generally provide, as a minimum, the location, opening times, number of spaces and cost.

In contrast to car parks, there are very few sources of location information for on-street parking. Although Parkopedia has the facility to display the location of on-street parking the data is often absent.

Some parking apps in addition to identifying parking locations also offer directions to reach a selected parking point. When this facility is selected most apps simply switch to the directions facility of Google maps which can supplement the guidance information with intelligence on levels of traffic congestion.

3.2 Is there a parking space?

Knowing if there is a car parking space available takes us into the realms of real-time data.

3.2.1 Car Parks

In the case of car parks, space availability is usually derived from counters based on measuring cars entering and leaving using induction loops embedded in the road surface, counters on the barriers or number plate recognition cameras. Outputs from the sensors go to a data management system that may also be, or be connected to, a city's urban traffic management and control (UTMC) system.

For on-street parking each parking bay requires an individual sensor. Generally the detection sensor is embedded flush with the road surface in each parking bay. They are battery powered and communicate with a relay point, with around 5 to 25 sensors per relay point depending on the physical layout of the street. The relay points are mains powered and communicate with each other, and then on to a gateway, over a wireless (RF) mesh network. The gateway handles all outgoing and incoming communications with the main data management system that is usually run by the sensor's vendor.

In many urban areas roadside signs display the availability of car park spaces. This data is often part of a city's UTMC and can be made more widely available through websites and apps as illustrated by the following example.

The Romanse partnership in southern Hampshire aims to influence travel behaviour by the provision of travel information and the use of modern traffic management techniques. This site not only includes real-time traffic congestion information but also the number of available car park spaces.

Where cities use the same a UTMC supplier with then their car park data can be presented on a single web site such as iHop2 (Edinburgh, Lancashire, Leeds, Norfolk, West Sussex) and Help2Park (Lancashire, Leicester, Norfolk).

Real time car park data connected to a city's UTMC system will cover the car parks run by the council but not necessarily car parks run by private operators. For example, ihop2 lists the NCP St Stephens car park in Norwich as ‘no live data’, yet Parkopedia gives live data, although interestingly the NCP website only provides static data. On the other hand NCP’s Castle Terrace car park in Edinburgh is present on both iHop2 and Parkopedia ‐ although the numbers of spaces are quite different with Parkopedia information matching that held on the NCP website.