Mobitrends

Portland, Oregon and Houston, Texas, are planning to cut costs by using city-wide WiFi “clouds” instead of cellular networks to connect “electronic parking meters”, reports GovTech Magazine.

One especially promising area is parking, where the wireless network movement is joining a new generation of high-tech meters to improve data gathering and increase revenue.

“We see parking as an important part of the public-service tier of services a Wi-Fi network could improve, along with traffic, maintenance and field inspectors,” said Houston CIO Richard Lewis, adding that this summer, Houston will become the first major U.S. city to manage its parking meters over a wireless network.

During the past decade, Lewis said, the city’s parking-meter systems had not kept pace with growth in the downtown area, which included new sports arenas and a convention center hotel.

“We had all these major investments in downtown, but we didn’t have enough parking, and we didn’t have parking meters that could take credit cards,” he said. “So we began to look at systems that took credit cards and had pay-and-display technology.”

Seven vendors responded to the RFP, which was issued in 2004, said Liliana Rambo, assistant director of the city’s Department of Parking Management, describing the parking system as a turnkey system the city will be solely responsible for operating. The software will do instant credit card approval online, and the city’s back-office operations will handle all credit card processing.

The City Council approved a $15 million deal with Affiliated Computer Services in early April 2006 for a network of 1,500 multiple-space meters — 750 of which will be installed this summer — to handle 2,300 downtown parking spaces.

The other 750 will be deployed over the next five years. The meters will be attached to a 60-node mesh network built by the city, said Rambo.

The city’s wireless network promises several benefits. First, she said, the city will save money by spending $300,000 to build its own network rather than paying a private vendor $125,000 per year for access to its network.

“Within three years we will have paid less, and we will own the network,” she said.

Houston wants to replace their 800,000 meters with some 1500 “smart meters”. Seven vendors, ACS, Cale Systems, Clancy Services, Parkeon, Rhino and SGR Controls competed for the contract.

Portland has some 1,000 Electronic Parking Meters and also plan to save money using WiFi (at $12/month). Currently they pay some $35/mo in fees. That includes the wireless CPDP connection (updated several times daily), along with additional fees from Visa for non real-time service. So real-time WiFi connections might save $20/month per meter or $20,000/month or about $240,000/year reports dailywireless.org.
Moreover, there’s been a lot of buzz recelntly about services that would allow you to pre-book your parking place anywhere in the city, this kind of projects would require thousands of sensors and greatly benefit from this kind of infrastructures.

Technorati Tags: wifi, municipality, parking