Polis network organised a meeting on parking innovation on 13 September 2018 in Prague, in partnership with the European Parking Association (EPA) and the Czech Parking Association. Polis members Prague, Lille, La Rochelle and Sofia presented their latest innovations in parking.
Historically, cities have been powerful out of randomness not the slick and clean that the digital revolution forwards, said ITF's Philippe Crist in his opening keynote. Creativity is different from developments that impact our cities, such as the artificial intelligence, which will bring anticipating of our behavior.
Petr Horsky of the Czech Parking Association, explained that initially, people saw cars as their jewels and argued that the city would be decorated by them, but slowly the perception of cars changes. Tsvetan Tsolov of Sofia reinforced the story. They received criticism of the local businesses and residents. But putting more efforts in promotion of the causes helped gaining acceptance of parking restrictions.
Karen Mounier of La Rochelle and Olivier Asselin of Metropole Lille talked about French depenalization reform, in which every city had to develop a new parking policy. Together with others, theystressed the integration of on- and off-street parking, saying that underground parking needs to become cheaper than on street parking, particularly for long parking periods. Vaclav Lukes of Prague enriched this with experience from Prague, where digital parking enforcement is already a reality today.
The Park4SUMP project, introduced by Tom Rye will develop the ParkPAD tool to review review parking policies, achieve consensus on improvements and to develop an action plan for parking in the participating cities.
All presentations can be downloaded here.
The article was published on www.polisnetwork.eu
