It’s commonly understood that a parking guidance solution helps to alleviate congestion issues by helping drivers find an available parking spot quickly and efficiently. This is why facilities that have a Parking Guidance Solution (PGS) are preferred by the driving public over those that do not.

There are three key PGS elements that help to save time:

At the entry to a parking facility, a sign advises how many bays are available on different levels or areas of the facility
Level wayfinding signs then indicates bays available at key wayfinding decision points throughout the facility
Indicator lights above parking bays shows, via different colours, whether a bay is available and/or is available for a particular category of parker (for example, electric vehicles or disabled parking)

These three wayfinding aids will help to save most customers several minutes of their time and reduce associated CO² emissions.

As an example, take a small community shopping centre car park with 500 bays across three levels located in a highly congested area.

A busy shopping precinct can have several bay turnovers per day, with an average bay turnover of between five and eight times per day – conservatively, this equates to at least 2,500 to 3,000 parking events per day.

As the car park fills up, the benefit of the PGS kicks in – as it is designed to provide increasing benefit as congestion ramps up.

Without a PGS and wayfinding signage, drivers entering after the first level has filled, would likely waste a couple of minutes circling the first level looking for a park before eventually proceeding to the next level. Those entering later will likely waste twice as much time as they circle first one level and then the second level looking for an available bay, before eventually proceeding to the third level.

Once the occupancy gets to 90-95 per cent full, drivers start to wait in a lane, idling, blocking lanes and adding to congestion and emissions significantly.

At this level of congestion activity, a good PGS and wayfinding signage solution can be helping to save each driver several minutes plus the associated emissions.

Being deliberately conservative with some calculations, assume this parking facility had a PGS installed that saved only 2,000 customers an average 2 minutes of their time. That still adds up to over 65 hours of community time saved per day, or around 24,000 hours in a year.

In terms of emissions, a conservative estimate would be for vehicles to be consuming only three litres of fuel an hour, mostly at an idling or low speed consumption.

So, at an average of 2.5kg of CO² emissions per litre consumed* we are saving over 480kg of emissions per day, or greater than 175t of emissions per year

That’s just one relatively small car park – so it is easy to see how with increasing adoption of parking guidance solutions, the savings in time and emissions can add up fast and significantly benefit communities and the environment.

Smart cities use data and technology to make the life and living environment of its citizens more efficient, and when it comes to parking guidance technology, the data and benefits really add up.

Park Agility has tens of thousands of sensors and a couple of thousand wayfinding signs in our network, helping our customers to save millions of hours of lost productivity and several thousand tonnes of CO² emissions per year for our communities.

This is a sponsored editorial brought to you by Park Agility. To find out how we can help your community, visit www.parkagility.com

*Source: National Transport Commission https://www.ntc.gov.au/