Foresight Parking

Early in the NewieVentures business journey, we were inspired to test and develop practical Smart City solutions.

This was at a time before Newcastle had even begun devising a strategic plan for its intentions of becoming a globally relevant Smart City. 

Further, our entry into the market predated how the phrase ‘Smart Cities’ has now been commonly adopted to describe technology that assists cities in solving urban inefficiencies.  

In 2016, Foresight Parking was our first foray into designing technology to do just this; to assist the city of Newcastle to become more liveable and efficient through a ‘smart parking’ solution.

Just what is smart parking?

The term Smart is normally applied to describe an electronic system that grants an otherwise relatively passive device a means of sensing the world around it. 

The sensing mechanism may be local via sensors or remote via a connection to the Internet. The extra abilities generally provide some sort of interactivity, turning an inert single function device into a configurable, communicative device. Hence the Smart Phone added Internet access and user applications to the mobile phone and the Smart TV added the same to (hitherto, dumb) TVs.

Thus, adding ‘smart’ to the front of how we talk about cities considers how we can enhance the physical, social, and economic wellbeing of an urban environment through the convenience found in smart technology. 

It was a no brainer then, to look at how a simple issue like parking occupancy could be solved using smart embedded electronics. 

What isn’t smart parking for smart cities?

For those of you in Newcastle - and in other large Australian cities - you’ll likely be familiar with the sensor-based, coloured LED lights that tell you which individual parks are vacant, occupied, and reserved for additional assistance customers located in multi-storey shopping centre parking lots. 

Although this technology has created some great simple efficiencies, individual parking occupancy lights don’t fit the category of Smart Cities for a number of reasons. 

Firstly, Smart City technology most typically looks at creating efficiencies in the urban spaces, rather than buildings, of cities. Sure, Kotara’s Westfield shopping centre could be considered a ‘Smart Shopping Centre’ for its sensor-based parking technology, but it would be too far of a stretch to call this a Smart City project relevant to the city of Newcastle, or even to the suburb of Kotara. 

Secondly, as citizens and urban planners have become increasingly aware of the possibilities smart technology can provide for their cities, an increasing expectation for interoperability (the ability for software to be exchanged and put to use in other products or software) renders the individual parking sensors not ‘big picture’ enough to consider solutions on a city scale. 

What smart city solutions does Foresight Parking provide?

Rather than monitoring individual car occupancies locally like the parking sensors in shopping centres, Foresight Parking looks at the entire car park and communicates occupancy data with users remotely and in real-time. 

This is done through the use of internet-connected sensor technology which is communicating through a low-powered, long-ranged network known as LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network). 

Sensors are installed at the gates of any pre-established parking area which work in counting how many cars have entered and how many cars have exited the carpark. This information is then sent to the Cloud, which allows anyone to view the carparks occupant numbers via the internet, whether it be over the web or through an app. 

Just as the name suggests, this technology gives users the foresight in their commute before they arrive at their destination. 

NewieVentures have trialled the Foresight Parking smart parking technology in a number of inner-city sites including the University of Newcastle Callaghan Campus, Stag & Hunter Hotel in Mayfield, and the Lee Wharf carpark in Honeysuckle. 

Foresight Parking is also currently monitoring carpark data for the Hamilton campus of Hunter TAFE NSW. 

If you feel Internet of Things (IoT) and other smart technologies could assist in making your city more efficient, liveable, and vibrant, drop our technology specialists a line today.