Automating on-street parking management
Ville Renouvelée Mobilité, under a public service delegation contract for the City of Roubaix, France, monitors and enforces parking in the downtown city center. Recently, the company invested in Genetec Curb SenseTM to speed up and improve on-street parking enforcement.
The company
Ville Renouvelée is an urban innovator in Lille Metropole, France. The company develops new urban spaces and enables a smoother city life through its wide-ranging expertise: sustainable development, urban renewal, construction and promotion, commercial real estate, economic development, urban mobility, and the stimulation of various sectors, etc. In 2018, when the MAPTAM law came into effect, the city of Roubaix signed a public service delegation contract with Ville Renouvelée Mobilité to monitor and enforce parking in its city center.
The challenge
To fulfill the mandate, Ville Renouvelée Mobilité followed the advice of Coppernic, its system integrator, and initially installed the Q2C parking management solution. While the Q2C solution worked correctly, it needed a lot of human interaction. “With numerous forms to fill out by hand, each inspection was taking a huge amount of time,” recalled Frédéric Pannier, Head of the Roads Unit at Ville Renouvelée Mobilité. They needed a simpler system to share parking spaces, reduce traffic caused by people searching for parking and encourage vehicle turnover.
The solution
Easy on-street parking management
With Curb Sense, all agents walk the city streets with a PDA equipped with Genetec AutoVuTM, the ALPR system. When an agent scans a vehicles’ license plate, Curb Sense sends a request to the server where all parking payment data is held and confirms whether the payment has been made.
Better enforcement efficiency
Using Curb Sense, validating vehicles takes no more than 20 to 30 seconds. The agents have much less information to input and there’s an automatic connection to the printer. This reduces agent interactions with the interface, thus avoiding operating errors and significantly improving operations.
Centralized parking insights
Curb Sense has also enabled a virtual Parking Center. All the inspections, number plate readings, and other vehicle and geolocation data are collected, correlated, and analyzed. Managers can then use real-time dashboards to review information, identify trends, and adapt controls.
“Curb Sense has really taken us to the next level of parking management in the city of Roubaix. Its automated approach is nothing like the previous system, which was far too manual. We are able to cover a much wider area nowadays with the same number of agents and to achieve our goals more easily.”
Frédéric Pannier, Roadway Division Manager, Ville Renouvelée Mobilité
Results
"The city of Roubaix has set us rotation targets,” explained Frédéric Pannier. "We had to carry out three inspections in the orange zone and four in the red zone every day, which means 12 to 18 kilometers of walking for each of our agents. Thanks to Curb Sense, we have doubled the number of vehicles being checked in a given period so we are able to achieve this goal."
Through a virtual Parking Center, managers can also review agents' activities, the number of inspections with valid parking, parking by a person with reduced mobility, or issues with a parking charge. The data is also used to identify trends and estimate parking occupancy rates to support urban development projects.