IBM and Streetline Address One of the Great Unsolved City Problems: Parking

Cities can use analytics to manage congestion, improve parking efficiency and make it easier to find parking

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Sep 28, 2011, 08:00 ET

ARMONK, N.Y. and SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Streetline, Inc. today announced a collaboration to help cities of all sizes reduce congestion, better manage parking availability and resources and put information at people's fingertips to find parking faster.

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Combining information management and advanced analytics from IBM with data gathered from parking sensors and applications from Streetline will allow cities to make smarter and more timely decisions related to parking and their transportation systems. Officials will be able to use this Smarter Parking solution to better understand parking patterns so they can improve citizen services, optimize revenue and more effectively allocate city resources.

Around the world, commuters deal with the daily struggle of finding a parking space. In fact, experts estimate that this causes 30 percent of urban traffic congestion. A global survey of commuters in 20 international cities conducted by IBM found that in the past year, nearly six out of 10 drivers had abandoned their search for a parking space at least once and drivers have spent an average of nearly 20 minutes in pursuit of a coveted spot.

IBM and Streetline will help cities deal with some of the toughest transportation challenges they face around parking. In the future, insight from the historical and real-time data being gathered can help cities become more proactive in anticipating how parking and their transportation network interacts with other city services and plan accordingly from how it might affect economic development and merchant services to how to appropriately schedule mass transit to how best to plan around infrastructure projects or special events.

"Today, there is a massive amount of transportation data available that can help cities alleviate congestion and improve transportation services, such as parking," said Gerry Mooney, general manager, global Smarter Cities, IBM. "It's critical for cities to be able to turn this data into information and insight so they can anticipate and avoid situations that cause congestion, while simultaneously improving the services they provide citizens and businesses."

"Parking is one of those universal challenges that most people around the globe can relate to," said Zia Yusuf, president and CEO of Streetline. "With this fully integrated offering, cities now have a turn key Smarter Parking solution that can produce tangible results and happier citizens."

Parking Reinvented

As the majority of the world's population moves to metropolitan areas, key city systems, including city streets and transportation systems, are being strained to the breaking point. Additionally, vehicle emissions resulting from drivers looking for parking are so closely linked that a year-long study found that drivers in a 15 block district in Los Angeles drove in excess of 950,000 miles, produced 730 tons of carbon dioxide and used 47,000 gallons of gas searching for parking.*

The Smarter Parking Starter Kit, being announced today, is a pre-integrated solution that includes instrumentation, connectivity and intelligence. This solution is designed to help cities "get out of park" and improve parking services, optimize operations and help reduce congestion. By leveraging advanced technologies from IBM and Streetline, cities will be able to:

Provide real-time information to allow citizens and visitors to find parking more easily;
Gather, analyze and act on information about parking resources and services to optimize revenue;
Analyze real-time information to better model and anticipate problems to reduce congestion, more appropriately price parking based on demand and provide enhanced services to citizens;
Integrate real-time information from on-street and off-street parking to enable collaborative decision making for rapid response to events, changes in parking availability and demand.

Streetline's patented smart parking platform detects the presence of a car through a network of ultra-low power wireless sensors located in individual parking spaces. This information is then made available in real time both to the city, as well as to consumers via Parker™, a free smartphone app via the iTunes Store or Android marketplace.

Using this real-time parking data combined with advanced parking analytics built on IBM Cognos, cities can then tap into this information to understand important factors including hourly occupancy, occupancy by block, parking duration, and trends by area.

Streetline was named the winner of the IBM SmartCamp World Finals and IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year in November 2010. Today's announcement is the result of work Streetline has been doing with IBM's Venture Capital Group to grow their business and uncover new ways to work together.

About IBM and Smarter Transportation

IBM works with cities, governments and others around the world to make their transportation systems smarter. Smarter transportation systems can help traffic and public transit systems flow more smoothly, anticipate and improve congestion in advance, reduce emissions and increase the capacity of infrastructure.

To join in the conversation on Smarter Transportation, join us on LinkedIn and Twitter. Visit here for more on IBM and Smarter Transportation.

About Streetline, Inc.

Streetline's mission is to make smart cities a reality through the use of sensor-enabled mobile and web applications. As the leading global provider of smart parking solutions for cities, airports, universities, private garages, and consumers, Streetline's pioneering technology connects citizens with critical information to improve the way they live and work, while making cities more efficient and lessening their environmental impact.

Streetline is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. with smart-parking deployments in California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Washington D.C. The company was recently named one of Fast Company's 10 Most Innovative Companies in Transportation, as well as IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year. Streetline was selected from more than 600 SmartCamp entries worldwide based on its outstanding technology, innovative business plan, and alignment with IBM's Smarter Planet strategy. For more, read a Smarter Planet blog post and watch this video on Smarter Parking.