Wayfinding parking signage in car parks contributes to smooth navigation for drivers, reduced congestion, and enhancement of the user experience. There are various types of parking signage that help guide drivers and pedestrians, each serving a specific purpose. Understanding these different kinds of wayfinding signage can help to ensure a parking facility has what it needs to improve efficiency and safety for its customers.

Park Agility is a business focused on the improvement of parking operations. We are first and foremost a technology company that has used intelligent automation from year 1, so it should come as no great surprise to learn that we are also a committed adopter of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some algorithms and solutions are internally developed, whilst others derive from the solutions of partners such as SONAH and Plate Recognizer.

Incorporating parking LED signage in a car park or precinct area offers enhancements for both operational efficiency and customer experience, making it a solid investment in parking infrastructure.

When talking to councils and asset owners, typically one of the reasons for installing a parking guidance system is to improve customer experience. This isn’t just lip service; customers often want the benefits a parking guidance system provides primarily because it makes finding a parking spot easy, reducing stress and frustration during peak periods.

The technology also helps users save time and fuel by directing them to available parking spaces quickly. This is particularly valuable in busy urban areas or retail car parks with high shopper traffic where finding parking can be time-consuming.

When drivers are being directed efficiently to available parking bays, congestion is reduced. This contributes to reducing the emissions that are sustained when cars crawl in circles searching for somewhere to stop, benefiting both users and the surrounding area by improving traffic flow. This assists with customer loyalty as drivers come back to retail centres that offer an efficient parking service.

These efficiencies can be maximised by facility operators who can optimise available spaces for specific categories of parker (disabled, pram, electric vehicles) to ensure these spaces are available and properly allocated. By using past data to predict surges in demand, facility management is improved and whilst customers may not be aware of this functionality, they benefit from the enhanced capacity these informed decisions create.

Parking technology that incorporates security features such as surveillance cameras and emergency call buttons can make users feel safer in parking facilities, particularly if they are entering or exiting in a remote area or in the dark. Those that can offer a modern and efficient parking experience gain a competitive advantage, being an attractive option for customers who know they will be safe and able to find a parking spot quickly on arrival.

Another element of building customer loyalty is by meeting specific requirements or integration needs, such as connecting to mobile apps or payment platforms that customers use. Parking technologies can often be tailored to meet these needs, piggybacking off the loyalty and convenience those apps and services generate.

As customers seek to go about their business efficiently, parking guidance systems can help them on their way – but only when the technology works as it should. Facility owners need to ensure the parking guidance system they choose to install is one that delivers accurate information in a timely manner. There is nothing more frustrating in a car park than following a green light only to find a bay occupied! When they do, parking guidance systems provide a high level of convenience that caters to the needs of a parking asset’s customers.

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Park Agility are delighted to announce a partnership with SONAH GmbH, German provider of camera-based sensor products and solutions. This industry-leading, camera-based solution utilises both edge processing and cloud-based processing involving sophisticated Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and can be used for traffic monitoring, vehicle counting, parking enforcement and as a key component in a parking guidance system.

The partnership adds to Park Agility’s range of products and solution offerings, which include multiple sensors; parking guidance systems; wayfinding signage; area and loop counting technologies; and precinct signage solutions.

Bringing to Australia a camera-based technology solution that complies with stringent GDPR privacy standards adds sought after capability. Data can be supplied to Park Agility’s SenseIQ management system that provides accurate, real-time information on occupancy and usage without adding to privacy concerns.

With a firm focus on accuracy and reliability, Park Agility’s customised approach to parking solutions takes into consideration the physical environment; asset size and complexity; operating costs and budgets; plus client-specific requirements and expectations. By incorporating a camera-based solution to our service offering, we continue to provide innovative, robust, and accurate technologies to both privately and publicly owned, on and off-street parking assets.

Talk to us today about camera-based solutions to improve your car park monitoring capabilities.

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Sensors, such as Infrared, Ultrasonic, LiDAR and Magnetic Resonance are often deployed for detecting the presence of vehicles in parking spaces and on the whole, they do that very well.

They provide accurate occupancy detection with low latency and processing overheads which is important for the provision of real-time wayfinding information to the carpark user. Whilst generally more accurate and lower cost to install and maintain, these four sensor types cannot provide additional visual information. That is the key advantage that comes with the use of camera sensors, though this advantage comes at a cost and the costs should be carefully weighed against the advantages.

Camera sensors offer the advantage of covering a wider area compared to individual bay sensors with a single camera sensor able to monitor four to six parking spaces indoors and as many as ten or more spaces in an outdoor environment, when mounted at height. However, the more spaces being monitored, the wider the lens angle on the camera and the higher the camera resolution that is also required. The higher the resolution, the higher the camera cost. Also the higher the resolution, the greater the network bandwidth to move the images and the higher the head end computing power required to process the images. It is a finite balance that takes ICT expertise and experience to manage well.

Costs and added complexity aside, by their very nature, cameras can provide detailed visual information and additional useful metadata when used in car parking management. Not only do they allow for recognition and analysis of parking space occupancy status, they can also enable vehicle tracking and identification using make, model and licence plate capture.

Whilst it can be advantageous to track and identify vehicles, such activity may face privacy concerns and potential liabilities. Asset owners considering the deployment of camera sensor solutions would be well advised to consider solutions offering the option of higher privacy compliance levels such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards.

Additionally, the tendency to deploy one camera sensor per four to six bays in an indoor car parking facility can be a compromise to accuracy. One would need to compete against the individual bay sensors on price to be certain, but increasing the potential for inaccuracy, particularly in the event of environmental factors or component failure where bay occupation count can thus be out by four or six instead of one. At Park Agility, individual bay sensors will always be considered the superior solution for this reason.

The area where cameras deliver the best outcomes is when used in access control and when used in bay occupancy count for large outdoor car parking facilities, particularly where there may be minimal structure.

In practice, particularly for larger car parking facilities, a combination of camera sensors and other sensor technologies is a good idea to leverage the advantages of both technologies. At any rate, seldom is vehicle tracking and identification required in all areas of a car park. More likely it is a requirement at entries, exits and more popular areas only – or at least areas where abuse is known to occur. A hybrid multi sensor approach can deliver accuracy, coverage, and help optimise cost-benefit.

Talk to us today for trusted advice on the best parking guidance sensors and solutions for your parking asset.

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The five most commonly used car detection technologies within the parking guidance system domain are : Infrared; Magnetic Resonance; Ultrasonic; Laser / LiDAR; and Cameras.

It will of course be the case that individual decision makers will have their own experience and preferences that come into play when selecting which sensor to buy for a particular project or site .Yet few individuals have solid experience with all five of the above sensors.

Each sensor type comes with its distinct advantages and disadvantages. When it comes to the operating environment into which they may be installed, their respective attributes merit careful consideration. It is important to recognise, particularly with larger more complex sites, that rarely can a single sensor type meet the complete requirements of a site and maintain a consistently high degree of accuracy across all areas of that site. As an example, a camera may be perfectly good for 100% of the site 22 hours of the day, but terrible across 10% of the site’s area that is impacted by sun glare at sunrise and/or sunset.

Park Agility is an experienced team with a sound working knowledge of each of these sensor types. We also have one of the largest installation bases of Parking Guidance Solutions (PGS) in Australia. In order to achieve our stated goal of 99.9% accuracy across the entire site, it is a ‘No-Brainer’ for the Park Agility team to undertake a site-specific Parking Guidance Solution design that takes into consideration varying surface areas, environmental and lighting conditions, as well as a range of other factors and then recommend one or more different sensor technologies.

As best we know, Park Agility is the only Parking Guidance System company in the market that has experience with all five sensor technologies and has integrated all five into its PGS Management System. At Park Agility: Accuracy Matters!

Contact us if we can help with your site.

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The ability to move people around urban areas efficiently is essential for access to jobs, education, healthcare, and other essential services.

Cities around the world are facing increasing traffic congestion, which leads to longer commute times, reduced productivity, and increased air pollution. Difficulty in finding available parking spaces only adds to increased congestion, wasted time and fuel. The use of personal combustion engine vehicles is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, which in turn has adverse impacts on public health and the environment.

Public transportation options may sometimes be inadequate, making it difficult for people to get around efficiently and affordably; and safety and accessibility concerns on public transport are also challenges.

Smart cities see the need to address all these challenges with a comprehensive approach that considers the needs of all users and promotes sustainable and efficient options. Smart mobility solutions, such as intelligent transportation, parking systems and shared mobility services, can help improve urban mobility and create more liveable and sustainable cities.

There are several reasons why parking guidance solutions are growing in popularity:

They optimise parking space utilisation By using real-time data to guide drivers to available parking spaces, they help to reduce the time spent searching for a spot thus reducing traffic congestion and emissions.

They enhance user experience By providing real-time information about parking availability, location, and pricing through mobile apps or digital signage, drivers can plan their parking before arriving at the destination and avoid frustration, improving their experience.

They increase parking management efficiency contributing to reduced costs in running a parking facility. Examples include scheduling changed availability for particular parking categories to increase bay volume at peak times; reporting of overstays in real time; and implementation of automatic payment facilities.

They provide data for future planning Asset owners can use reporting and monitoring tools for future planning, peak period management and revenue optimisation.

Managing the challenges modern cities face is an ongoing priority and integrating parking technology as one part of a smart city’s solutions can efficiently and cost effectively reduce some of their impacts.

By using inductive loops, when vehicles drive through a passageway its magnetic field changes and sends a communication signal to indicate movement in or out of a parking facility.

There’s a common perception that magnetic resonance loops are not an accurate way to count vehicles, however the reality is that they can be used to great effect. When people say this form of car counting doesn’t work, it’s typically not the metal loop in the ground being referred to, rather the sensitivity of the software trying to analyse the activity that is being tracked.

There are a number of traffic scenarios that are difficult to count with low tech solutions – for example wide passage lanes that allow a two-way flow of vehicles, but with no structure in place to separate the lanes. Cars will often drive straight through the middle of the two lanes if there is no oncoming traffic, which triggers three or four loops, instead of the normal two. This creates a count challenge for low tech solutions that cannot interpret the data correctly.

The loop counting solution developed by Park Agility avoids these problems and delivers car counting capabilities with 99.9% accuracy. By designing our own electronics board and writing our own firmware and software, complex traffic scenarios can be configured into the constant analysis of activity across loops and multiple count points.

In addition to being highly accurate, it is more often the case that loops will be a lower cost to install than other car counting technologies and a lower cost to maintain over their lifetime. The solution is also robust – able to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in all weather conditions unlike some other sensing technologies. A solution such as this is perfect for local governments and asset owners that have open air car parks they wish to count to put real time bay availability information on wayfinding signage in order to help reduce congestion in local precinct areas.

Lasting for a decade plus, a magnetic resonance loop counting solution represents excellent return on investment. They are also quick to install with less downtime for the car park, meaning customers and operations are not disrupted for a lengthy period.

Highly accurate and with data delivered to dynamic wayfinding signage in real time, Park Agility’s loop counting solution is an easy win for relieving parking congestion in busy areas.

Talk to us today about your car park counting solution requirements.

Up to 30% of congestion is caused by people looking for parking spaces* and precinct signage that can display wayfinding and parking bay availability data accurately and in real time not only contributes to cutting the emissions that this congestion and circling creates, it also immediately improves the customer experience.

Park Agility’s Cloud-based solutions, ability to integrate with existing systems and options for communicating means that data can be collected from multiple car park sites – both indoors and outdoors – and shared to signage located at decision points throughout a car park to assist motorists.

Static signage is no longer the only option, with closer pitched and more capable signs that offer numerous pieces of information optimising the investment in parking technologies. This sign located in Bankstown Sports Club’s car park incorporates bay availability numbers, parking categories (EV and disabled), directional arrows and a ticker-tape style dynamic message. Easily edited, the messaging can include club marketing and promotions, community safety messages or anything else an operations team may wish to share with their customers.

When it comes to signage, Park Agility’s motto is simple: any size, any content, anywhere.

For site tours, quotes, technical specifications and trusted advice, get in touch.

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* JamesBuczkowski, Ford’s Director of Electrical and Electronics Systems Research andAdvanced Engineering. Cited by Biggs, T. (2015). Sydney Morning Herald.

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