CHICAGO, March 5, 2020 — Finding parking is now easier than ever. Arrive announced today that it has added industry-first features to its enterprise parking platform that will radically transform the way we park: a smart parking recommendation engine that suggests the best on-street or off-street place to park and transacts seamlessly using your voice, in-dash system or mobile phone.

Arrive becomes the only parking technology company to integrate a variety of data sources into its platform, including navigation details, traffic, weather, on-street parking prices and availability, dynamically priced off-street parking, and deliver it through a cutting edge recommendation engine for customers. Through the acquisition of sPARK Parking Technologies and their industry-leading technology, Arrive reinforces its position as the leading provider of transactional parking solutions for connected cars, autonomous vehicles, car share companies, and more, and provides drivers an unparalleled parking experience.

“Imagine having a personal assistant who helps you choose and navigate to the best spot while considering price, availability and parking restrictions from among the myriad options in real time. We are making that a reality today,” said Yona Shtern, CEO of Arrive. “We’re thrilled to be the first to offer customers and partners a single source for all types of parking and a profoundly better experience finding, paying for, and navigating to the best space possible in cities across North America. This is a game-changer — not only for our company but for our partners building smart cities and experiences in vehicles that will shape the future of mobility.”

When a driver selects a destination via an Arrive-powered mobile app or website or asks Alexa or other voice platforms to find a parking space near their desired destination, Arrive’s platform will recommend the single best space available in real-time by comparing on-street metered spaces with unmetered blocks and off-street options in a lot or garage. The recommendation provided will vary depending on the day of the week, time of day, how many people are parked in the area, other events happening and more.

Arrive’s recommendation engine will launch first through the ParkWhiz Alexa skill and on the company’s apps in select cities this summer before expanding nationwide. While Arrive had been building and testing a recommendation engine for some time, it is acquiring sPARK, a Tel Aviv-based technology company, to help scale the engine to multiple cities more quickly. On-street parking pricing and availability will be provided by a network of partner companies and providers.

“We’re delighted to be joining Arrive in its mission to transform mobility through its smart, connected parking services. Our team has been focused on making parking easier to find for a long time and we believe our technology and experience will further accelerate Arrive’s evolution into the backbone of urban mobility,” says Zohar Bali, CEO of sPARK.

sPARK employees will join Arrive’s existing team in Tel Aviv at the company’s Global Mobility Lab. Together, they will focus on building and enhancing technology that facilitates the last mile of mobility, including recently launched connectivity solutions that will enable frictionless garage entry and exit at tens of thousands of lots across North America.

About Arrive

Arrive powers the last mile of mobility through smart parking solutions. It offers the only seamless mobility experience that predicts and recommends the best parking solution for any journey. Arrive powers smart parking and other connected mobility services through apps, websites, voice platforms, and in-dash integrations to hundreds of clients including smart cities, automakers, fleets, venues, navigation and voice platforms, as well as to its own ParkWhiz and BestParking consumer brands. For more information, visit www.Arrive.com.

About sPARK

sPARK was founded in 2012 by Eran Balter and Zohar Bali in Israel to address a widespread urban problem: lack of parking in city centers. To address the problem, the company developed a recommendation engine that allows people to easily and efficiently find an ideal parking spot in cities. sPARK’s mobile app, Polly the Parking Fairy, and SDK utilize urban data, statistics, and real-time information help drivers reduce the time they spend looking for parking, saving them time and money

By Steven Grant and Michele Krakowski

The parking industry is at a strategic inflection point. We are in the midst of an avalanche of new players and cutting-edge solutions to enhance or replace traditional parking systems. Owners now realize two things: There is a vast number of parking technologies on the market today that can interact with their core parking revenue control systems, and extracted data from these parking technologies provide information about financial performance and customer behavior to dramatically enhance customer services and revenue.

Technology offerings now include mobile and online applications for alternative access and payment methods, discounts and promotions, loyalty programs, space locators, and pricing. Additionally, there are third-party sales channels and demand-based product applications. Lastly, parking access and revenue control systems (PARCS) technologies, such as license plate recognition and guidance systems are also leveraged to create new offerings that increase customer service, data, and security.

All too frequently, new technology is purchased for the wrong reasons—an executive sees a cool demonstration or wants to be the first to implement something perceived as cutting-edge. Without defined goals, the results are disappointing, with low adoption rates and unexpected operating efforts. Four primary goals for implementing new technology should be:

Improve the customer experience. Provide more choices, better information, quicker entry and exits, and more
payment options with intuitive, easy usage.
Increase revenue. Provide more products, demand-based pricing, promotions and discounts within and outside of parking, and third-party sales channels for parking and other products and services.
Decrease costs. Reduce labor and maintenance and increase security.
Obtain data—data analytics, customer campaigns, product performance, competing market data, pre-registered parkers, license plate regions, and passenger counts.

A Roadmap
Every organization should keep a roadmap of the current and future technology it plans to implement. The timing of each rollout and customer campaigns is critical to prevent customer confusion. Think about how many payment options and related readers are now available. An entry station can easily have seven entry options, which is overload to a customer. Clean, smart
solutions pay off.

So what are the challenges posed to owners? They depend on several factors:
Maturity of the third-party technology.
Requirements for the application program interface (API) components that allow interaction with the core PARCS.
Total price of the application, required interfaces, transaction fees, other recurring costs, and operating efforts.
Stability of the platform.
Accuracy of the data being transmitted.
Flexibility of reporting.
Payment processing and payment card industry (PCI) compliance.
Release process and ability to influence future product features.
Support and response times during and after installation.
Hosting options (local, remote, cloud).
Network and communication options.

The market promotes modular, plug-and-play applications with installation timeframes in weeks instead of months. While today’s products bring much greater ease and speed of interfacing, the elements of implementing technology remain. And while swapping out one application for a similar one can be done more quickly now than ever before, it still requires a degree of planning and testing.

The parking industry is seeing increasing demand to interface with the myriad of software solutions now available. As parking customers demand more access to real-time parking data or software that allows them to make parking decisions quickly, owners are also looking to mine data across their parking operations to better understand that information, manipulate it for marketing and customer loyalty purposes, provide an improved parking experience, and increase revenue and margin. However, there is more than meets the eye when it comes to technology selection and implementation.

Steven Grant is owner of Aberdeen Management Group and a member of IPI’s Consultants Committee. He can be reached at steven@aberdeenmg.com.

Michele Krakowski, CPA, is principal of Lumin Advisors. She can be reached at mkrakowski@lumin.us.com.

TPP-2016-04-A Smart Approach to Parking Technology Interfaces

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Member News: ARRIVE adds innovative smart parking recommendation engine to its industry-leading enterprise parking platform, combining on-and of-street parking in a single solution

A Smart Approach to Parking Technology Interfaces