Enhancement of parking management system in cairo using smartphones

Abstract

Over the past two decades, traffic authorities in many cities have developed so-called parking guidance and information systems (PGI) to help drivers to find the available parking spaces. In Cairo, the capital of Egypt, the PGI has been recently implemented in 2015. This research mainly aims to develop and assess a new approach for introducing parking information based on a smartphone application that can inform the users about the number of available parking spaces within the studied garages not only in the real-time but also in the near future based on historical data. The need for such an application was investigated before deployment by a questionnaire survey, while post-deployment feedback was used to evaluate the developed application as a tool to enhance and overcome the current parking management system defects. In addition, the current parking management system has been evaluated based on drivers’ opinion. The results showed that despite the PGI system has been deployed since 2015, only 70% of the participants were aware of this system. Out of them, 23% used the system. The main purpose of this is that the VMSs were not working sufficiently and some of them are not clear enough to the drivers. Around 46% of the interviewed drivers stated that when they didn’t find a space in the garage, they usually do not find an alternative parking space easily and they waste around 15 to 20 minutes searching for available parking spaces, while the average search time for those who are using the system was between 5 to 10 minutes. Finally, 99% of the participants believe that using more advanced parking guidance system through smartphone application will be more useful. A smartphone application has been developed as an advanced alternative tool for providing users with the number of available parking spaces not only in the current time but also in the near future time. This was done by developing predictive models for parking spaces availability at each garage over the daytime using the collected data. This application was evaluated based on the feedback of about 70 participants who used the application. The feedback analysis showed that 82% of the users were satisfied with the application, only one out of 70 participants have complained about the ease of use. Also, 89% of the participants have agreed that the application help in reducing parking search time with an overall average of 8 minutes.