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one else’s account? Circontrol built in a number of safeguards: in one, the charging station sends a small electrical charge out, which the car returns in a closed loop. If someone unplugs a car, that small charge drops, and so the larger charge turns off as well. They’ve also designed a metal “hat” that locks down over the plug after payment.
The company has already shipped more than 300 units to pilot programs across Europe. Electric cars, or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, are now coming on line so quickly, says Barea, that “the challenge is to be ready with all our operations and logistics, with the stock ready to manufacture.”
In Search of Parking
Parking guidance systems have been gaining ground in parking garages around the world. The Parkare group provides guidance systems for more than fifty thousand parking spaces, along with license plate recognition hardware and software, and has sold more than twenty thousand of the on-street parking meters known as pay-and-display, which replace traditional meters with a fee boxes that sell tickets to be displayed in car windows.
Parkare is investigating the best ways to use the latest technologies to facilitate parking. “If you’re booking a ticket on line for a movie, we can add another button to book your car space. So you can go to the movie and know that you have a spot reserved in the garage,” says Francisco Martin, international division director of Parkare.
The most efficient system to charge drivers and manage traffic in a city challenged the owners of Barcelona-based Open Traffic Systems to develop an entirely new on-street parking method, which they refer to as a “complete parking solution.”
The centerpiece of the design is a payment kiosk, which not only accepts payment for the parking space, but displays an entire computer screen to manage the interaction. The user types in her license plate number, pays for parking time, and gains access to information on bus routes and local businesses. The license plate information is then sent to a central server, which broadcasts the data to the ticketing authorities monitoring the streets with handheld PDAs. Open Traffic Systems also provides a system for the authorities to use while driving around and checking the license plates: two cameras mounted on a car scan the streets and can read the plates, matching plate numbers against ones in the system. This technology was unveiled in a 500- unit system around the northern city of Bilbao, and is now being sold elsewhere in Europe and North America.
The technology demands a greater upfront investment than traditional parking meters, according to Clint Burnette, Open Traffic Systems project manager, “but you need fewer enforcement agents, and they take less time [to figure out who deserves a fine].”
In the latest upgrade, geared towards environmental sustainability, the system can run off solar power. It also includes Circontrol’s electric car charging stations as a payment option, and offers rugged, gear-free bikes (to avoid damage common to city rental bicycles) that can be paid for at the kiosk and deposited at other sites around a given city. One such pilot system has been installed in the north of Barcelona.
Even at a time of economic challenges, cities envision these systems as potential revenue sources that will yield a good return on investment, adds Burnette: “We’ve hired new people for the last six months, and we have so much work we’ll have to hire more.”
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