The City of Cape Town’s kerbside parking operator for the CBD, Street Parking Solutions (SPS), has been testing parking bay sensor mats on a section of Long Street in the central city since November 2010.
The success of the trial has resulted in the City granting SPS permission to expand its parking sensor base to 1000 permanent sensor installations within the CBD area.
The original trial used a portable rubber mat containing a parking sensor, which was placed in the middle of the parking bay each morning at 08:00 and then removed at 17:00.
When the sensor detects the presence of a vehicle in a parking bay, a signal is sent to the back office computer and to the hand-held units carried by parking marshals. In this way, compliance with the applicable parking periods can be monitored.
The trial has proved to be very useful to the operator as well as providing real-time parking information to the City and has included the following benefits:
- Increased parking turnover from sensor monitored bays compared to non-sensor monitored bays
- Increased time restriction compliance from sensor monitored bays compared to non-sensor monitored bays
- Immediate notification of overstay violation to a hand held unit
- Accurate data management and reporting, such as:
- Bay occupancy
- Duration of vehicle stay
- Percentage of unoccupied parking bays in an area
- How often maximum time periods are exceeded
- Accurate resource management of parking marshals allocated to sensor bays
- Real time data of parking behaviour by motorists, including Parking By-law compliance.
The permanent parking sensor will not impact on the way motorist’s park because it is static and non-intrusive.
