Park Adelaide app and 2,800 sensors installed at Adelaide parking spaces another step in Smart City ambition
Sensors beneath existing numbered carpark spaces were used to notify motorists through the Park Adelaide app (left) what on-street parks are available.
Nearly 2,800 parking sensors were installed across Adelaide's CBD in 2018 in the city council's latest Smart City project.
The sensors beneath existing numbered carpark spaces notified motorists through the Park Adelaide app what on-street parks were available and enable them to pay or top up through a smartphone or device. The project was a key initiative of the City of Adelaide’s ongoing Smart City agenda.
Fully interactive with a raft of capabilities, the Park Adelaide digital app gave directions and helped navigate motorists to available parking spaces, as well as providing accurate, real-time information around parking availability and controls such as time limits and tariffs.
App users could pay for their parking session and an alert to remind people when their time was about to expire means so they could remotely top up their payment to the maximum time limit.
The smart parking initiatives were seen as a way to replace the need for expensive multi-storey carpark stations once autonomous vehicles arrived in “large numbers”. It cost about $1,000 per square metre to build a vertical car park and each car needs about 30 square metres for roads and ramps, adding up to about $30,000 for each carpark space.
The city council also launched a project to monitor people movements in and around the city, with 60 people movement sensors across the CBD and North Adelaide. Pedestrian, cyclists and vehicles will be counted without identifying individuals, their mobile device or any other personal information. The first video detection devices were installed on Hutt Street, North Terrace/Bank Street, the intersection of King William Street and North Terrace, and Gouger and Franklin streets.
Both the parking sensors and the people movement sensors reflected Adekaide City Council’s council's part in the Australian Smart Cities Consortium led by associate professor Nick Falkner from the University of Adelaide's school of computer science.
The Australian Smart Cities Consortium started in 2017, with its management committee involved in projects such as improving urban transport and rainwater harvesting, turning smartphones into location-sensitive tour guides, and smart parking. The consortium's role was to match up university faculties, academics and people outside of computing and engineering to address many problems in city living.
