Parking & Access Control

Norwegian-headquartered tolling specialist Q-Free is to acquire 100 per cent of the shares of TCS International (TCS). Established more than ten years ago, TCS has fifteen employees, with offices in Boston, US, and a subsidiary in Toronto, Canada. The company provides advanced transportation management systems (ATMS), specialising in intelligent parking guidance and management systems. TCS offers consulting solutions and systems design for a wide range of clients including cities, transportation organisati

Finnish identification solutions provider Idesco is deploying its access control readers for the expansion of the City of Oulu’s access control system. City systems integrators Stanley Security and Capitis Control chose the readers to enable access by thousands of municipal employees across two distinctive systems, in almost one hundred buildings. Idesco says the City of Oulu’s expanding access control system will begin saving money through its ongoing deployment of the latest generation of eco20 energy-sa

A custom-built application, powered by ParkMe, enables drivers in the Washington, DC metropolitan area to instantly locate available parking at the touch of a finger with the introduction of parking operator Colonial Parking's new website location finder map and mobile app for iPhone. ParkMe allows the data from Colonial's 250 locations to be streamed to mobile apps, in-car navigation systems and GPS devices and provides drivers with parking information, such as rates, entrance points and even real-time oc

UK-based metric parking is to supply a further twenty-seven of their Elite pay and display parking machines for an extension to a parking project in a suburb of the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur. The order follows the shipment of eighty-two similar machines last year to the city of Petaling Jaya and brings the total number of Metric machines in Malaysia to more than 1,000. Metric Group export manager Mike Hewett praised the part played by the Metric Group’s Malaysian distributor My One Solution, and said:

The Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) and co-author Steven H Bayless will present a new report titled Smart Parking and the Connected Consumer - Opportunities for Facility Operators on Monday, 10 December at the Hyatt Regency, Jersey City in conjunction with a Smart Parking Symposium in Jersey City, New Jersey. The report will analyse both the opportunities and challenges faced by parking facility operators and technology providers when implementing smart parking systems. The repo

Motorists in Aberdeenshire, Scotland will soon be able to charge their electric vehicles and use solar-powered parking machines in town centres across county. Twenty of the solar-powered parking meters will be fitted at a cost of £80,000 which allows motorists to pay by cash, debit or credit card or their mobile phone. The council heard that the current parking machines are prone to theft and often break down. It was suggested that the redundant power supply from the ageing parking units could then be used

Thanks to a partnership between parking technology provider Streetline and Cisco, drivers in the San Francisco bay area of the US are now able to locate the nearest vacant parking space using just their smartphone and a mobile app called Parker. First deployed in Sausalito, the system has now been installed in San Mateo and San Carlos. It uses a small wireless sensor about the size of a golf hole installed in the parking bay to detect whether the space is occupied by a vehicle. Each sensor wirelessly comm

Vialis and Nedap are to join forces to improve traffic flow in Dutch cities and make parking easier. Vialis, a subsidiary of VolkerWessels, will integrate its Vivaldi dynamic traffic management system with the Nedap Sensit wireless parking space detection system. A large number of municipalities in the Netherlands already use Vivaldi to optimise traffic flow via traffic control systems and signs; Sensit wirelessly detects vacant parking spaces. By combining the two technologies, motorists will be guided to

Metric Parking has been successful in winning orders for their pay and display parking machines in the UK and is to supply three local authorities in the south-west of England with their popular Elite pay and display machines. Bristol City Council has ordered the machines for on-street resident parking schemes in the city, using coin operated machines which will have an alpha numeric keypad for vehicle registration entry and will be networked through the Metric ASLAN web back office system.

In the US, NaviGAtor 511, Georgia’s traveller information system, has partnered with Waze to provide enhanced traffic information. Waze, a crowd-sourced social GPS and real-time traffic application for smartphones and Android phones, will provide enhanced traffic data to the current 511 system, and create a special 511 user group, specifically for Georgia travelers, within the existing Waze mobile app. The arrangement was provided for under an existing marketing contract with Iteris, the firm that has opera