An analysis of technologies enabling smart parking solutions

At airports, downtown areas, and around transit park-and-ride facilities the demand for parking is relatively high and usually exceeds the number of available spots. Consequently, drivers "waste" significantly large amounts of time on the streets just to find a place to park. This squandered time leads to various social, economic and environmental costs (e.g., increased gas emissions, fuel consumption, driver frustration, etc.). With increasing market share of GPS cell phones in the nation, it is economically feasible to deploy smart parking solutions that provide real time information about the locations of parking facilities, the number of available parking spots and the associated time and parking access costs for the given facility. The focus of this paper is to define the various stages of the wide-spread deployment of an efficient smart parking system into the public realm. This paper discusses some of the essential services, which shall be provided by the proposed smart parking system; these fall under two categories: pre-trip and real time parking services. Then, three technologies (Wi-Fi, GPS and RFID), which could potentially be used in order to implement these services, are presented. As will be demonstrated throughout the paper, both GPS and RFID will prove to be a necessity for future smart parking systems. The paper shows that a combination of these technologies on a chip integrated within mobile phones will guarantee an efficient and secure parking system for all potential users.