What is an Automated Parking Guidance System?
Picture yourself entering a parking garage. As you drive down the aisle, an overhead row of green and red LED lights shows you where the unoccupied spaces are. As a result, you quickly and smoothly find a desirable place to park.
For parkers, this is the core benefit of our patented automated parking guidance system (APGS). For clients, the rich data collected by our camera-based APGS helps facility owners and operators to intimately understand the goings-on of their garage and forecast activity and staffing — making facilities more customer-focused, more efficient, and more profitable.
The APGS has become a must-have technology for any business or entity seeking to operate more efficiently, elevate the customer experience, and maximize revenue opportunities.
Elevating your customer’s parking experience
The overarching goal of an APGS is to minimize stress, uncertainty, and obstacles for the driver from the parking process. An effective APGS is designed to provide a smooth and stress-free customer experience. The system accomplishes this by enabling each parker to make an easy, smooth transition from initial entry to an open space — while improving overall traffic flow throughout the facility/property and even in the surrounding areas.
The heart of an advanced APGS is a network of camera-based smart sensors that tracks occupied and unoccupied spaces across a garage, surface lot, or campus in real-time. The familiar green and red LEDs enable parkers to quickly find an open space, greatly reducing the time needed to park. As a result, parkers reach their destination faster and more relaxed.
Smart-sensor LEDs: The heart of a camera-based APGS
In addition to the green and red indicators, LED lights on an advanced APGS can be configured remotely to display a wide range of colors. For example, blue for an ADA-compliant handicapped space or purple for an electric vehicle space.
Unprecedented insights to heighten efficiencies
The data and analytics gathered by Park Assist’s APGS provide a wealth of information on customer preferences, usage trends, cost analyses, and more. This empowers you to fine-tune your business strategies and procedures to operate more efficiently and profitably.
Providing parkers with real-time wayfinding info
Another key customer experience component of an APGS is digital wayfinding signage positioned at each key decision point. Based on real-time information gathered by the patented smart-sensor cameras, a network of continually updated signs collaborate to quickly direct parkers to open spaces, including:
- Signs upon arrival. For properties with multiple parking areas, a multi-facility sign announces the number of available spaces at each garage or surface lot, enabling drivers to decide on the best facility to park in at any given moment.
- Secondary signage within a chosen car park. Once a driver has chosen a specific
garage, a dedicated sign displays the number of available spaces on each level. - Directional interior in-aisle pointers. Once drivers have committed to searching for a space on a particular level, these signs enable them to make on-the-spot decisions (left, right, or straight) based on the number of available spaces.
- Signaling color-coded LEDs on the smart-sensor cameras. Driving toward a green LED light, the driver successfully occupies the only open space at the end of the aisle. The vehicle parks.This is when the smart-sensors close the loop for the wayfinding process. The LED light turns red indicating no available parking spaces nearby.
- Car locator features. Using license plate recognition (LPR) technology, an APGS can also keep track of parked vehicles throughout the facility. This customer experience-centric feature can help parkers find their vehicle quickly upon return via touchscreen kiosks, a connected parking app, or a finder-enabled pay station.
Putting wayfinding at the parker’s fingertips
The wayfinding benefits of an APGS are further extended via connected cars and mobile apps. This enables parkers to begin their search from wherever they live or work. First by driving to a well-located facility, then quickly navigating within their chosen car park.
Giving parkers an added sense of safety and security
Parking customers are especially concerned today about their own personal safety and about security for their vehicles.
Particularly in parking garages, traditional security systems often lack an unobstructed view of key areas where undesirable events can take place: in and between the parking spaces themselves. Since the camera-based smart-sensors in an APGS are installed above the driving lane to monitor spaces on each side of the aisle, this vantage point provides an unobstructed view of each parking bay.
A bird’s-eye vantage point for enhanced surveillance
Camera-based APGS sensors also serve to enhance and augment traditional security systems. Providing both a functional and a visual deterrent to theft, vandalism, and assaults.
Automated parking guidance system sensors can also capture streaming video whenever motion is detected in or around a space. With an expanded level of security that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive, owners and operators can guard against liabilities due to theft and assaults — while leveraging license plate recognition (LPR) to identify and report any known threat vehicles that enter or exit a facility.