INVISIBLE TOUCH

Touch-free, hassle-free, reduced-stress parking in an inclusive mobility ecosystem that includes autonomous vehicles. Stop the clocks, the future is here!

Earlier this month Mohammed Al Ali, the CEO of Dubai’s Parkin Company PJSC, announced that his company had launched Phase One of its ‘hassle-free’ Smart Parking Camera System across Dubai, introducing the region’s first AI-powered public kerbside parking and automated payment ecosystem.

The project includes the deployment of 500 smart cameras for kerbside parking and People of Determination parking spaces across key areas in Dubai and 200 additional smart cameras dedicated to parking lots and open parking areas.

This initiative, he said, supported Dubai’s vision for digital transformation and smart mobility by delivering, among other things, a seamless and fully digital parking payment experience; real-time parking occupancy insights to enhance traffic flow and customer convenience, integration with intelligent traffic systems to improve mobility and quality of life, and instant detection and enforcement of parking violations through AI-powered monitoring.

This is great news for drivers looking for somewhere to park in the UAE - but in Europe the promise of hassle-free parking has been realised for several years.

Intertraffic spoke with two companies providing cutting-edge, innovative parking solutions where not even the driver is the centre of attention.

A COMPLETE PARKING ECOSYSTEM

Hozah offer a fully automated parking payment system that connects drivers’ credit/debit cards to number plate ANPR recognition cameras that detect when drivers enter and exit Hozah-enabled car parks. The parking fees are then automatically billed for the length of their stay without any action required by the driver. A simpler process is hard to imagine.

“We see Hozah as a complete parking ecosystem,” says CEO and co-founder David Fowle from their new HQ in Croydon, South London. “It started from the ground up with Hozah Autopay, which allowed drivers to sign up with their payment methods and their car number plate. Whenever they use one of ‘our’ car parks they don’t have to do anything to pay for the session.

“We built an entire landowner-facing ecosystem, so we now manage complete car parks and have done so for many years. And what that means is a completely digital, completely technology-oriented basis for managing the car parks, that's everything from multiple payment methods, the Hozah Pay By Web system, the Hozah Pre-book system, season tickets, kiosks etc, through to marketing car parks, the enforcement of the car park and, of growing importance, data for landowners. The ecosystem generates increased revenue for landowners, whilst deterring abuse of the car park, and it does it all from a technical basis.”
 

“We see Hozah as a complete parking ecosystem”

The last time Intertraffic featured Hozah was in an episode of our 2020 Inside Intertraffic podcast series, when there was no “physical” event due to COVID-19, and at that time Fowle and his fellow co-founder Naomi Bishop were spending a lot of time in the West Midlands trying to convince the region’s local authorities to change the habits of a lifetime and switch to Hozah’s innovative solution. So, six years on, where are Fowle and his now many more cohorts in terms of its customer base?

“We service both local authority and private landowners, where we provide a completely different solution for each,” he replies.

“One of the really interesting things is that both types of clients care about Auto Pay and I think it's a brilliant system for them, but more and more we're being asked by our local authority clients to expand what we're doing to service them in other areas, and so we're looking at the complete local traffic ecosystem in a number of instances. We're expanding our offering to look at other enforcement types that they require, which mainly involves moving traffic enforcement. We're taking the Hozah ecosystem, which, of course, at its core is an ANPR-based system for managing car parks, and expanding it outside of the car park, as the same type of enforcement that's required for private landowners using ANPR, is very similar to the type of enforcement that local authorities are using for moving traffic offences.”

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THE ALIGNMENT OF INCENTIVES

What, then, is the company’s ethos? Founded in 2017, one of its stated aims is to create smarter, sustainable mobility while delivering exceptional value and convenience. How it goes about doing just that is a story in itself.

“I would say it is a question about aligning incentives, as traditional car park operators have in the past very much focused on making their income from issuing PCNs. When David and Naomi Bishop, Hozah’s Chief Growth Officer, started the company, it was very much from the other end of how we can make parking the fairest and the best experience for drivers,” explains Ninh Hao, Hozah’s Chief of Staff.

“Drivers can trust that the system will charge them accurately and automatically every time. No need to guess how long your hospital appointment will take - Auto Pay covers you for the full duration, taking the stress out of a hospital visit. Once you're ready to leave, you simply drive out, and then you'll get the charge sent to you, and you'll know how much you've paid.

“Hospitals don't ‘see’ drivers, they see patients, visitors, nurses, etc., and it's the same thing with universities, who have students and professors, and so on. Every car park is linked to the destination of where a driver is going. Our system treats the drivers this way. The same goes for our private land owners, especially in retail and shopping centres, which is our biggest segment. What is it they actually want? They want people to come back more often, they want people to stay longer. They don't want people to think I've paid for two hours, can I get a quick coffee? I probably can't. I’d better get to my car and go home.”

“Drivers can trust that the system will charge them accurately and automatically every time”

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

Which brings us neatly on to the sub-topic of influencing human behaviour… and doing so subtly.

There’s been a fair few articles that we have published on this website in the last 12 months or so that have had an undeniable undercurrent, in a good way, of nudging human behaviour. Not in a demonstrative, Orwellian way but by gently suggesting that if you did this differently you might benefit in some way. It’s been proven that the average person does need something of an incentive in order for them to change even one element of their behaviour. To, as the saying goes, change the habit of a lifetime.

Says Hao: “If we’re talking about Mobility as a Service and its entire ecosystem, including parking and EV charging, the nudge is actually on both sides for both the driver and the client. There's a nudge for the driver in saying, if you use Auto Pay it takes the stress out of parking – no faff, no app, and no worrying about PCNs.”

“To give you a real-world example, we have a lot of drivers who contact us to say that their elderly grandparents go to the supermarket in a specific shopping centre once a week, every week. Therefore, they want to sign the grandparents up to an Auto Pay account because they know that once they’ve done that, their grandparents can simply drive in and drive out, knowing that parking is automatically charged. Our solution is extremely inclusive for elderly people, people with disabilities and so on. So there's a nudge on that side.

“There's also a nudge on the client side in terms of how they should think of their parking asset. For property and real estate clients focused on buildings and tenants, parking is an afterthought - until the technology starts driving longer stays, repeat visits, and a visible lift to the bottom line. Suddenly,” she concludes, “we have clients saying to us that after they put the system in, their car park generates as much revenue as one of their tenants.”
 

“Our solution is extremely inclusive for elderly people, people with disabilities and so on”

WHAT MAKES CITIES WORK

It's six years since we last featured Hozah - so what about the next six? What does Ninh Hao think the parking industry will look like in 2032?

“You won’t be surprised to learn that I spend a lot of time thinking about parking,” she replies, clearly not joking. “I studied sustainable urbanism. I studied what makes good cities good, and parking is part of that. Parking is woven into how cities work. Often you can take a look at parking, and it will tell you a lot about the location you're in. If there is a congestion charge, if it’s a low traffic neighbourhood, if there's a School Streets where they capture moving traffic offences, that all tells you about what kind of area that you're in. So, car parks, in that way, are a bit of a barometer to see how that place thinks of their overall travel mobility ecosystem. As cities grow denser and we get a higher population, parking will, in cities, especially, become even more scarce, but we're not going to get rid of parking. What we need is a way to better allocate it to the people who genuinely need it.”
 

“Parking is woven into how cities work”

A SINGLE POINT OF TRUTH

For Christopher Head, Arrive’s Regional Director for the UK & Ireland, however, there’s so much more to parking than just finding a convenient space in which to leave your car for a period of time.

“We are creating a single point of truth. For organizations to bring data points together, which is why we're developing a global mobility hub,” he explains. “There are a lot of different operators, such as people who manage data in a city, that just don't talk to each other, be that a city itself, a transport authority like TfL or Île-de-France Mobilité.

“We are talking about off-street parking operators and on-street parking operators. To make a city work better, you need to create a place in which all of the data comes together and can be viewed holistically, because these companies are still in some ways competitive. But there's a level of collaboration that is necessary to improve mobility in cities and improve the kerbside.”
 

“We are creating a single point of truth”

A SELF-DRIVING NEAR FUTURE

Where do autonomous vehicles fit into the overall vision? In all the excitement generated about the advent of driverless cars coming to Europe’s streets in the very near future, ie this year, not a lot of press coverage has mentioned parking for AV. Where will they go when they are between journeys?

“I think it depends how forward-looking you want to be, but within the context of that, we're at an interesting point now where autonomous vehicles, robotaxis, are looming,” says Head. “They'll be in the UK before the year's out, if not by the end of summer, and they're already in the US. The way that we manage our kerbside is really important, and the way that these vehicles are integrated into our cities is important. And that's actually a huge part of getting that data piece together now is ensuring that we're able to introduce vehicles in a way that is beneficial to people and doesn't cause an increase in congestion and doesn't put increased pressure on parking spaces. And with that holistic, high-level view, you could do some interesting things.

“If you have a fleet of robotaxis at a railway station, you don't need all of the taxis operational all the time. You need flex in the system. The amount of cabs you need on the street during Christmas party season is not the same as you need during the summer holidays. So you need somewhere to put these vehicles. What you can do, if you have that wider level view, is you can start to create places for these robotaxis to rest and to be offline without having to fully leave a city and go back to wherever their hub is.”
 

“The way that we manage our kerbside is really important, and the way that these vehicles are integrated into our cities is important”

This is where the holistic approach to parking pays dividends - almost literally.

“If you have that higher level view, you can say ‘this car park has some free spaces so we can put a few AVs there’. Or ‘this local authority car park has got a couple of chargers and they could charge there.’ You can start to do more interesting things if you have that higher-level view and cooperation. So that's what we're trying to build,” says Head.
 

NAVIGATING THE MATRIX

Currently, as he explains, Arrive are at the very preliminary stages of building a unified place for cities to look at where their pay stations and their app data comes in.

“But what we're talking about is much bigger than that. It's relatively complicated, or it's more complicated than it looks because you have a few permutations of it. Take Waymo as an example - how do you run that service if you think about servicing and cleaning, just to name two things?

“As we see it where Arrive sits is almost like a translation layer between the likes of Uber and Waymo and the cities involved because all those companies' main aim is to make money. And the cities' main aim is to improve mobility, which generally involves reducing congestion, improving options for end users. It's a whole matrix and those two aims can be at odds with one another.”

One thing that mobility companies are looking to avoid with the impending influx of autonomous vehicles is a situation where the market becomes suddenly flooded with robotaxis, similar to how some cities were when Uber and Lyft were introduced or more recently with the influx of e-bikes from providers such as Lime and Forest.

Says Head: “There is a strong desire for that to not happen again with autonomous vehicles, because especially at the start, you're just adding vehicles to the street in huge numbers, potentially making empty journeys. You need someone who, which is where Arrive is, that sits there and can ensure that both sides are getting what they need. And also, the thing I think is relevant is what makes Arrive relevant to this conversation: how do cities and councils currently manage parking? How do they manage kerbside space? Generally, through payment and enforcement. Autonomous vehicles need to be integrated into cities' existing parking payment-based paradigm. And that's where we come in because we have relationships with OEMs, we do in-car payment for BMW and Skoda and through Parkopedia.

“Autonomous vehicles need to be integrated into cities' existing parking payment-based paradigm”

“We can have that level of integration into a vehicle where, if you have, a barrier control system or even an ANPR system, we can do the bit where the system recognises it’s a Waymo car, and that it’s ‘Waymo Car 5’ and we can charge Waymo Car 5’s payment card. I think, a really key part of how you make it work is that municipalities don't want to lose the revenue stream. That's one way that local authorities make money. It's not like councils in the UK, especially, are particularly flush for cash. Losing that stream of revenue, of parking revenue, would be undesirable for them.

“Offering them a way to make sure that they can integrate in that way, I think is interesting. And so, that's what we're developing: a sort of a hub where all parties can come into it, and you can have all the background data into it as well.”