[imagesource: Parket]

Cape Town could become the centre of a parking revolution.

Instead of opening your car window to get a ticket from a parking machine and then hustling for R5 coins to pay, a smart new app is introducing cashless and ticketless parking.

We have Joshua Raphael to thank for this.

Noticing that a stone’s throw away, empty indoor parkades stood unused, he saw an opportunity to make a difference for all of the Mother City drivers trying to find a spot along the busy streets, negotiating traffic, and paying exorbitant fees for outdoor parking, per IT-Online.

Asking the right questions – “if there is so much demand and supply right next to it, what can we do to bridge this divide and monetise assets for corporates and other organisations so that dormant assets can become a source of profit?” – Raphael created a parking app called Parket.

Image: Parket

The mobile app makes use of licence plate recognition and user QR code access technology, alongside smart management software, to make parking more accessible for drivers and more profitable for landlords:

“This platform allows landlords to allocate bays, and tenants to manage many employees with a limited number of parking bays in real time, while enabling seamless visitor access and the ability to pull up reports from a user-friendly dashboard. The added ability to sell vacant bays on a demand-led basis has proven exceptionally popular because of the profit it generates from an otherwise stagnant asset,” says Raphael.

AI is built into the system, which recognises licence plates once the users have registered their vehicles, allowing them to drive through to parking without having to touch a thing.

“The efficiency of our IoT platform is the wow factor. After entering their number plate details into the app, all skepticism disappears when they pull up to a parkade and the boom immediately opens for them, and this amazes people.”

One customer who has already used the app remarked on how magical the efficiency is.

Business Insider notes that while “some systems manage access control and others manage the paperless hourly allocation of parking bays or a marketplace for vacant bays, [Parket] is the only platform that integrates all these functionalities into a single interface”.

It is for this reason that landlords can be grateful for the reduction in headaches that come from managing their tenants and space, such as dealing with lost access cards, new cars, and the sharing of access tags or cards.

There is already possible parking available off Bree Street, near the old Christiaan Barnard Hospital, at the lower end of Long Street, and in other areas where finding parking has traditionally been a nightmare.

Viva la Cape Town parking revolution!

[sources:itonline&businessinsider]