June 28, 2023
On June 11, Ministry of Transportation spokesman Wu Chonggen once again urged car owners to install ETC in a timely manner, encourage application of ETC in car-related areas such as parking lots, and promote application of ETC in residential areas, tourist attractions and other parking areas. The development of smart parking once again reached national level.
Three main disadvantages of traditional parking
1. Unreasonable allocation of parking spaces
The average ratio of cars to total parking spaces in my country is 1:0.6 and there is still a gap of 50-60 million parking spaces. Parking resources in cities of first and second echelons are increasingly below demand, and in small and medium-sized cities situation is even more serious: in some cities, parking spaces do not make up even half of car fleet.
2. Parking stairs are bulky
Parking steps in traditional parking lots are cumbersome, so car owners have to find their own parking spaces. In particular, some parking lots with difficult scenes are unfriendly to some unskilled drivers, which exacerbates parking problems for car owners.
3. Fees are high and opaque
There is nothing new about opacity and arbitrary parking charges.
Benefits of Smart Parking
The commercial value of parking industry is enormous. Our country has a shortage of parking spaces of 60 million people, and China Business Industry Research Institute predicts that parking industry will become a ten trillion yuan huge market in future.
1. Increase parking space utilization
Data show that more than 90% of cities in my country have free parking rates above 50%. Smart parking can use cloud data to rationally allocate parking spaces and improve utilization rate of parking spaces.
2. Improve parking efficiency
30% of overall traffic congestion problems are caused by parking difficulties, and 48% of vehicles have to queue to get in and out of a parking lot. The ETCP smart parking system can let 11 cars through in one minute, three times efficiency of original manual toll collection.
3. Tariffs are more transparent and affordable
Smart parking reservation, parking duration and parking payment can be done online, so that car owners can directly request relevant parking information on mobile application, thus avoiding chaos such as "arbitrary" parking fee charging.
4. Saving money
Intelligent parking is basically self-managed by system, removing most of human control links, so it can save parking labor costs, and reducing parking vacancy rate will increase parking revenue. and parking fees for car owners will also become more affordable.
Barriers to Smart Parking Development
Five years have passed since concept of smart parking appeared in 2014. Even though its market has reached tens of billions, there is a huge gap with estimates in trillions, and it has not been applied on a large scale. The coverage rate in areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen is only 7%. The reason why development of smart parking is not going as fast as expected is that smart parking is not buying smart.
1. Information repositories still exist
The introduction of smart parking has changed high vacancy rate caused by information asymmetry, but there are now a large number of smart parking companies operating in this valuable new segment of smart parking. like 38 companies in this business, and companies are fragmented. There is no public platform for data exchange, flow of information is difficult, and phenomenon of information islands still exists.
2. The cost of product is high
Smart parking needs to use wireless communication technology, mobile terminal technology, GPS positioning technology, GIS and other technologies, and degree of engineering integration is high, so cost of smart parking is relatively high. Renovating 800,000 parking lots across country is expected to cost 16 billion yuan, according to China Report Network.
3. The problem of lack of parking spaces cannot be solved radically
Smart parking can only reduce number of vacant parking spaces and alleviate problem of parking. However, there is a huge gap between demand for parking spaces in my country and actual number of parking spaces. Combined with problem of vacant space, it is difficult to radically solve problem of lack of parking spaces.
Smart parking breakthrough
It makes sense for smart parking to be undeveloped and immature as it is an emerging industry, but trillion-dollar smart parking market is not waiting for enterprises. In two directions, aimed at breaking information barriers of platform and expanding technology research and development, it can effectively promote development of intelligent parking.
But in my opinion, product environmental enrichment is an important breakthrough for smart parking. The car is as an important scene of human life, it can occupy almost one tenth of life time of a modern person, so it will be a new type of "user entry". Therefore, after-sales businesses such as car repair, maintenance and beauty treatments, and even peripheral businesses such as entertainment, shopping and medical care can be integrated into the smart parking system, and this huge transportation port can be used to create a larger market.
