Tag Archives: infrastructure

IPMI News: IPMI Partners with City Tech to Launch the Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab

City Tech collaborative logoIPMI Partners with City Tech to Launch the Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab, a Cross-Sector Collaboration to Help Shape the Future of the Parking Industry

May 6, 2020

In partnership with the International Parking & Mobility Institute, City Tech Collaborative is launching a new Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab, a cross-sector consortium that will transform urban parking facilities – including Millennium Garages, which spans 3.8 million square feet beneath downtown Chicago – into testbeds to envision and implement new technology-enabled solutions and business models to help shape the future of the parking industry.

Founding Members of the Lab include Millennium GaragesSP+, and Arrive. As the world’s largest association of professionals in parking, transportation, and mobility, IPMI is a Strategic Partner to the effort.

The Millennium Gateway seeks to more fully integrate parking into the broader mobility landscape – including public transit, ride- and vehicle-sharing, electrification, and automation – as well as to explore innovative facility management, freight and logistics hub opportunities, and other creative space uses. City Tech will showcase the partnership at the IPMI Parking & Mobility Virtual Conference & Expo on June 1-2, 2020.

City Tech is an urban solutions accelerator that tackles problems too big for any single sector or organization to solve alone. The Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab is part of City Tech’s Advanced Mobility Initiative, which includes 25+ corporate, municipal, and civic partners working to create a more seamless, accessible, and far-reaching urban transportation systems. Learn more at CityTech.org.

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About the Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab:

The Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab is a groundbreaking partnership to shape the future of the parking industry and urban mobility. As a consortium of asset owners, parking and mobility operators, technology providers, policymakers, and other thought leaders, Lab participants work to integrate parking more fully into urban transportation systems, develop tech-enabled solutions for smart infrastructure management, and cultivate value-added services and space uses.

The Lab is part of the Advanced Mobility Initiative at City Tech Collaborative, an urban solutions accelerator that tackles problems too big for any single sector or organization to solve alone.  Founding members and strategic partners of the Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab include Millennium Garages, SP+, Arrive, the National Parking Association, the International Parking & Mobility Institute, and the City of Chicago. Learn more at www.CityTech.org/Parking-Innovation.

Uber Joins Call for Mandated Mobility Features, Regulations

A bike lane improves mobility on a city streetUber, one of the granddaddies of transportation network companies, this week added its voice to those asking the U.S. Congress to prioritize the safety of bike and scooter users through a number of incentives:

  • New mobility infrastructure legislation that would require bike lanes be included on newly repaved roads according to a formula developed by the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
  • Congestion pricing to help fund mobility infrastructure while decreasing traffic from single-occupant vehicles.

Uber’s City Mobility Campaign will support legislation that improves bike, scooter, and micro-mobility infrastructure. It issued a letter to the U.S. House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure this week and plans to release a free data tool that will let cities and individuals understand and advocate for mobility improvements in their own areas using JUMP bike volume and city views. Read more here.

GARAGE CASE STUDY: An Automated Solution to Parking Perils

By Christian Hermansen

PARKING IS A NECESSARY EVIL IN THE PUBLIC’S MIND. It’s something we all do be­fore going shopping, hanging out with friends, or catching a game. It’s the experi­ence before the experience.

As someone who has recently joined the parking-sphere, I see parking as something where you either have a neutral experience or a below-­average one. Con­sumers rarely perceive a top-notch parking experience.

This lines up with the feedback I hear from friends, family, and members of the general public. People forget the times where everything worked perfectly but re­member the bad experi­ences when it all went wrong. Circling for ages and not being able to find a space, getting confused by not knowing where to drive, and the resulting congestion are all reasons for a negative parking experience.

Parking is also (normally) the first impression a customer gets of the place he or she has just arrived. Everyone knows how important the first impression is in any interaction! It sets the tone for the expe­rience. Making it easy, stress-free, and frictionless means your customer is content when he or she walks in the door ready to engage with your offering rather than lamenting over the bad experience in your park­ing lot.

Many large providers and operators of parking, particularly shopping centers, airports, and cities, are acknowledging this and are taking steps to ensure the best neutral (or even net positive) experience possible for users of their parking. If only there was some way of automatically displaying occupancy and guiding people to available parking spaces.

Circling for ages and not being able to find a space, getting confused by not knowing where to drive, and the resulting congestion are all reasons for a negative parking experience.

Case Study: Irvine Spectrum Center

The Irvine Company has worked for five years to make parking easier for visitors to the massive Southern California shopping center the Irvine Spectrum Cen­ter. It started with the outdoor parking area and then moved to the indoor spaces, with a number of custom requirements catered for along the way.

When the company sought to install another in­door solution at the new Block 800 parking garage on the south side of the site, it took into consideration lessons learned from its established Irvine Center parking areas. Being a new garage, a key component of this project was to keep that minimal, slick, and premium look and feel with the parking guidance installation.

Since implementing the initial parking guidance project at the Irvine Spectrum Center, a new method of detecting vehicles, using an eye-safe, class-one laser sensor mounted in the middle of the driving aisle instead of an older, Bluetooth sensor, had been developed. Users say it offers detection ac­curacy but also greater reliability from eliminating batteries, having no hardware on the often harsh road surface, and a lower cost of install.
But with a new sensor in the equation, the integration done in the past with the site’s existing strip-lighting and LED guidance lights needed a redesign to incorporate new components.

Retrofitting
With a large, internal team of product and hardware engi­neers, along with a dose of can-do attitude, the vendor was able to produce a new fixture to seamlessly attach to the end of lighting enclosures.

There are some other significant benefits to integrating parking guidance technology with existing lighting infra­structure. For example, integrating with the existing infra­structure at the parking lot meant an extremely low-impact installation. Installers were able to use an existing power supply and wire power into the same power supply as the lights, reducing costly cabling or the need for specialized power points.

Anecdotal evidence on the ground suggests the parking guidance is working. Speaking to parking users on a recent site visit, I was told they thought the garage looked smart, new, premium, and clean. Users also told us they enjoyed the easy journey and fast parking and compared the experience they’d just had with an experience in a garage without parking guidance. Customers often cited those “red and green lights and the signs” as the reason for that.

An easier parking experience gets you off on the right foot with your customers. Reduce the time to park, re­duce congestion, reduce circulation time and increase your customer’s experience.

Read the article here.

CHRISTIAN HERMANSEN is brand manager with Frogparking. He can be reached at christian@frogparking.com.