Parking adds to urban congestion
Thirty percent of all traffic congestion is caused by vehicles navigating streets to locate parking, according to a report from UCLA. This creates a substantial impact on emissions. The Urban Mobility Scorecard indicates that 3.1 billion gallons of gasoline are wasted within the United States due to congestion each year. Therefore, the 30 percent of wasted gasoline to vehicles navigating for parking equates to 930 million gallons of gasoline and 18.6 billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
This is equivalent to the emissions produced from providing electricity to 1.25 million homes, the size of a large city. All of this waste comes from drivers just looking for a parking spot.
Sustainable innovation can help
Making it easier to find parking is crucial to reducing these emissions. Fortunately, innovation in parking technologies is accelerating at an astonishing rate. One such development is the use of cloud-based enterprise application integrations to collect occupancy data across multiple facility-management platforms.
Once aggregated, parking occupancy data can be used in signage, vehicle management systems, GPS and parking apps. These data displays can direct drivers to vacant parking stalls, reducing the number of cars congesting urban streets.
Until recent years, it has been a challenge to extract and gather data from the various automated platforms that currently manage parking facilities. However, with the rising implementation of Internet of Things solutions, the use of parking data is becoming an industry best practice. Our world is becoming more interconnected in its use of data, and this is good news for driving and parking.
Imagine driving down a city street, and with little effort, you can navigate directly to a parking spot waiting to be occupied. Not only does this provide ease to the consumer, it also helps to limit the parking industry’s effect on the environment. As parking technology advances, fewer cars searching for parking equates to less greenhouse gases—which provides a more sustainable environment.