EasyPark was established in 2001 in Stockholm, Sweden, and to date, they stay “passionate about parking.” The company introduced its B2C services in 2012 and recently launched its service in Portugal.
They now serve 27 countries all over the world with their EasyPark app and aim to solve the parking crisis in today’s and the future’s smart cities. The app has an inbuilt ecosystem that does more than just show you the available parking spots. It has data for available parking spots as PDaaS (Parking Data as a Service), wherein the data is analyzed and represented in a pictorial fashion.
Fifty sustainability smart cities
The company recently conducted a study on 50 cities around the world and ranked them based on the potential they carry to become sustainable smart cities in the future. There are many companies and startups that are working on the same because we can now see the future needs of smart cities.
With smart cities comes great responsibility for smart parking. The table above shows the highest-ranking metropolitan cities that have the infrastructure to incorporate digital parking innovations. These cities have populations between 600,000 and 3 million, are also some of the world’s expensive places to reside in.
The following cities are ranked on two tables that also have the infrastructure for parking innovation technologies. The left table represents cities with a population above 3 million and the right table has cities with 50,000 to 600,0000 inhabitants.
The unaccounted ones
If this article were to reach a homeless person, let’s say in England, these glorious figures and innovations won’t even provide them with a blanket to survive the biting cold weather and politics in the UK. After the COVID outbreak, the highest increase in homelessness in Europe was observed in England, Ireland, and Belgium. Meanwhile, countries such as Portugal, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, and England are facing the worst housing cost increase in 30 years.
In Germany, roughly half of the low-income group households spend around 40% of their income on housing. “It is particularly shocking that a country that is as wealthy as Germany should be among those with the highest rates of housing exclusion,” said FEANTSA director Freek Spinnewijn. While in the US, around 39% of the population, is currently homeless, out of which 1 in 5 is a child.
Scandinavian countries, Isreal, and Japan
Regarding the adoption of green technologies, and making room for the growth of smart cities, the CEO of EasyPark Group says, “Whilst metropolitan areas in Europe score well across the various size categories, the study shows that Scandinavian cities all rank particularly highly.” Since the COVID crisis, Norway, Finland, Canada, Austria, Denmark, and other countries have seen a fall in the homelessness rate compared to their contemporaries.
It is also interesting to see Tel Aviv and Tokyo in the above list for citizen adoption of new technologies. Tel Aviv is a beautiful city on Isreal’s Mediterranean coast and has a population of over 400,000. The homelessness rate in Isreal doubled between 2018 and 2020, but the people of this city are very tech-savvy. Technology is one of the few sources left for Israelis, especially women, to find or invent jobs in the midst of a polarized political environment.
Meanwhile, the capital of Japan, Tokyo, has cutting-edge technologies as it is also one of the early adopters of tech. This comes at a cost of people’s living standards. There are many hard-working tech innovators in Tokyo who are desperately trying to rise on the social ladder in their bite-sized apartments.
It is always good to see new innovations and solutions technology is capable of providing. But we cannot ignore the ones who are on the streets, and many do not even have a social validation. So if the governments and companies act together to find housing solutions for the homeless, it is possible to at least imagine some utopia in the future of smart cities. The basic pillars of a city are its people. Personally, I think the question we need to present to leaders is “what will you do in a futuristic and digitally superior city where its people are rotting away in silence?”
EasyPark app
Spanning across over 3,000 cities, the company works on the demand-supply principle to manage parking problems and congestion in smart cities. While the demand, of course, is for parking occupancy, the supply is of the number of available parking spots with their applied restrictions. In other words, this is one of the ways in which the company’s PDaaS functions. Each project that the company onboards takes about three to six months per smart city to complete.
EasyPark also displays the available electric vehicle charging zones. The traffic restriction data and parking occupancy dates are collected on the ground with the company’s geo-information software. The datasets are assessed in real-time and are integrated into the app. With the ‘Find & Park’ in-app option, the users will receive the city’s parking data on the app’s ‘Parking Dashboard.’ These services are centralized by the company’s, SmartHUB, a smart hub that helps control the digital platforms or devices remotely.
YouTube: EasyPark’s Parking Data-as-a-Service (PDaaS)
Photo credits: The images used are owned by EasyPark and have been provided for press usage.
Source: EasyPark / DW / Noah Buhayar, Esmé E Deprez (Bloomberg) / Gearoid Reidy and Yasutaka Tamura (Bloomberg)
Editorial notice: Update 15th of February 2022 – We corrected the year dates in the first paragraph.
