TimeTec Smart Parking 3/12: Parking - Past, Present & Future

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Parking history started not when the car was invented in 1866 by Karl Benz, but when cars became widely available in the early 20th century. The history forked in two ways, on-street and off-street parking. For on-street parking, it started in the early 1930s in Oklahoma City, United States. For on-street parking, the parking meter was invented and introduced by Carl Magee to solve the haphazard parking of cars everywhere, causing traffic congestion problems. The installation of the parking meters didn't only solve the traffic problems but also created a new business revenue and a new cost for vehicle owners who wanted to park their cars downtown.

Magee started the Magee-Hale Park-O-Meter Company to manufacture the parking meters. The company later changed its name to POM (the initials of Park-O-Meter), and it is still active in manufacturing parking meters today.

 

 
For public off-street parking, the history traced back much earlier than on-street parking. As more people owned cars, parking became a problem, and cities were looking for a solution to park as many cars as possible on as little space as possible, especially for off-street parking when cars at that time weren't weather-resistant as today's, which preference would be indoor garage-based parking. In 1905: Garage Rue de Ponthieu built the very first automated parking garage in Paris, France. It was a multi-story car park site with an internal lift, which moved the cars from one level to another, with the help of some car park attendants to drive and park the cars in available spaces; or today we called it valet parking. Garage Rue de Ponthieu wasn't a fully automated parking garage, but many consider this garage to be the first with the automated elements and, therefore, the forerunner of the Automated Parking System. Technically, it was a semi-automated parking garage.

1905: Garage Rue de Ponthieu, Paris

Nowadays, all building developments have to allocate specific parking spaces that adhered to cities and municipalities' ratios to ensure adequate parking spaces. For example, a retail mall will generally have a higher parking ratio than an office tower. All kinds of parking system and technologies evolved to fulfil the different requirements over the past decades.

Teh Hon Seng, CEO of TimeTec Group, commented, "For a long period, parking access and fees collection system has been transformed from a manual system to unmanned ticketing and cash collecting machine. Now TimeTec Parking came in the digitalization era to give the parking system another boost, transforming it into a ticketless, cashless and touchless system, which we will discuss in the next few articles in this parking series."