Smart Parking Application

Ms. Shampa Ganguly, Co-partner, Pristech Analytics

Pparke is one of India’s first smart parking applications that enables commuters to locate parking lot easily, reserve parking spot and pay by phone. It aims to predict parking spot availability for future day/time. The Software has been developed by Mr. Pritam Ganguly and Ms. Shampa Ganguly, with over 20 years collective experience in IT. They have founded a firm, Pristech Analytics that develops parking and relevant applications and IT solution. The company is currently incubated at IIMB Incubation Centre (NSRCEL). In an interview with Built Constructions, Ms. Ganguly insists on making existing systems smarter through real-time data to optimize mobility on a massive scale.

BC: For a sustainable networked platform, technology plays a vital role. How ICT (Information Communication and Technology) can empower a sustainable and a smart city?

Smart city is a connected ecosystem that is accessible, sustainable, scale able, and serviceable. At the moment, technology works at individual level or enterprise level. All we need within a Smart city is bring these stakeholder into a centralize technology platform and management; mobile phone integration; hardware (IOT) and software innovation; and most important of all coordination among various stakeholders; private business owners, municipalities, authorities, public users.

In my opinion, instead of focusing on building more roads and rails, we should work on putting intelligence into our existing systems make smart roads, smart parking, and smart city and use real-time data to optimize mobility on a massive scale.

BC: For the smart cities segment, what kind of parking solutions do you offer? Please quote few examples where your solutions are implemented in India?

Searching and waiting for a parking space is a routine and often frustrating activity for many people in cities around the world. In India, this search burns about more than 12000 litres of gasoline every year. Traffic congestion and carbon footprint increases manifold due to this continued search and wait for parking space in India. Parking Demand & Supply is in the ratio of 8:1 in Bangalore.

Pparke, a parking analytics app is a first step towards predicting where people will likely find a parking spot and mobile-phone-enabled automated payment systems (wallet) that allow people to reserve parking in advance. When deployed as a system, pparke thus reduces car emissions in urban cities by reducing the need for people to needlessly circle city blocks searching for parking. It also permits cities to carefully manage their parking supply. In addition to lending convenience and environmental benefits, pparke parking improves the utilization of existing parking, leading to greater revenue for parking owners. These solutions can make differences not just on a neighbourhood level but also on a city level and to significantly contribute to transportation-sector greenhouse gas, pollution and traffic reductions.

We are currently doing projects with both private (malls), public sector in Bangalore. Providing reservations of parking spot and last mile connectivity related to parking. Couple of interesting projects upcoming up are on West coast of India providing last mile connectivity related to parking.

BC: How do you see the relevance of your solutions to make cities smarter in the Indian context?

Pparke is a smart way to stay connected to neighbourhood parking. Our platform helps commuters to reduce driving by almost 40% which in turn reduces waste in gasoline usage. In the end, urban spaces can become greener; cleaner; more sustainable. For parking owner, Pparke SaaS provides key insights on the parking market dynamics & trends, competitive landscape and end-user usage analysis across various sites. The dashboard speaks about the expected revenue from different types of parking sites on different dates. The dashboard also analyzes multiple pricing options, loss of customer due to longer queues or unavailability. It explores business potential of parking management solutions across varied industry verticals such as academia, government and municipalities, transportation, recreation, healthcare, hospitality, retail, corporate and commercial parks, and Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance and others. In short, Pparke helps to make parking lot more profitable propositions.

BC: Seamless connectivity interconnecting citizens, government, business and objects is an integral part of smart cities. Is current Indian physical infrastructure in the apt condition to support ICT environment?

Partially Yes. Future is all about Mobility, Cloud, IOT and BIG Data. Already, more than 24 million are on smartphone i.e. always on Cloud. We have to find more seamless and effective way to extend the Mobility and IOT together in such a way that we address multiple sector of the future cities like Smart water management, Smart Homes, Smart cars, Smart Street, Smart parking, Smart lighting, Smart school and many more.  We are on right track, time just that we should stay focus and make it work.