The Praga Studios office building in Prague’s Karlín district is now equipped with the most modern parking system in the Czech Republic, which combines a mobile app, intelligent cameras, and digital signages. The author of this innovative solution is Sharry Europe, a PropTech company that developed it in cooperation with Skanska. Smart parking increases user convenience, brings companies financial benefits, and is environmentally friendly.
Are you looking for a way to improve productivity and employee satisfaction? Start with parking. Employees who commute to the office by car spend an average of 10 minutes a day looking for a free parking spot. Over the course of a year, they therefore waste about five workdays. In addition, people looking for parking generate up to 30 percent of urban traffic.
Companies offer parking in their buildings, but often do so inefficiently. Drivers must for example blindly drive into the garage and look for a free space. If the garage is full, they exit and continue to drive around on neighbouring streets.
Or there’s the opposite case, where parking spots are reserved for specific users, but even though they might be away on a business trip, no one else can use them. Yet flexibility is an evident trend – according to a survey by JLL and Skanska, employees would prefer to work outside the office 3-10 days a month.
AN INNOVATIVE SOLUTION
Sharry Europe, a leader in the PropTech (Property & Technology) field in the Czech Republic, presented what revolutionary “smart parking” really looks like. The system is installed in the recently completed Praga Studios office building, which offers 115 parking spots on two basement floors.
Jan Klemsa, a Sharry product owner, describes how the revolutionary system works:
- A smart camera at the entrance automatically recognizes your vehicle’s licence plate and lets you in. (If you use more than one car, all you need to do is add the new plate number in the mobile app.)
- A second option is to use your smartphone loaded with a virtual access card, which is an alternative to the plastic cards users usually have to search their pockets or purses for.
- Screens mounted below the ceiling will then greet you by name and show you where you should park. (If you park elsewhere, the system will automatically notify the administrator.)
- The parking garage then contains more Dahua smart cameras, which indicate whether individual spots are free using green and red LEDs. They are also used to determine whether you parked your car with a given plate number in the right place.
AN EXPERIENCE FOR VISITORS
Parking at Praga Studios is divided into three zones. “Selected spots are reserved for specific users. The majority of the garage is assigned on a first-come-first-served basis. The remainder of spots are reserved for visitors,” adds Sharry’s Jan Klemsa. The number of parking spots in individual zones can be changed as needed.
Drivers have current information on the number of free stalls for their company in the mobile app as well as on the screen at the entrance. They thus do not need to drive into the garage and waste time looking for a free stall. “Based on our analyses and statistics, we will also add predictions of how full the garage is at various times, similar for example to how Google provides information on how busy restaurants are during various parts of the day,” says Jan Klemsa.
Smart software also offers a maximally friendly experience to building visitors too. Visitors can enter their plate number in the system, and when they enter the garage, the person they are coming to see will receive a notification on their mobile phone.
AN ECOLOGICAL AND INNOVATIVE SOLUTION
This innovative parking system not only helps saving time, but also helps the environment and is a part of “green” philosophy. “If we minimize the amount of pointless driving and fruitless searching for parking spots drivers have to undergo, we thus reduce the amount of automobile emissions in city centres,” explains Skanska’s safety and sustainability manager Eva Nykodymová.
In November, Praga Studios also became the second-greenest office building in Europe according to LEED certification. This office building project also received an award from the jury in the Best of Realty 2019 competition for “emphasis on sustainability and hitherto unseen amounts of the latest technologies”.
In 2020 the parking system will be enlarged to include users from the neighbouring PRAGA Rezidence project, who will use the same garage entrance. “We are considering a shared parking model that would be the first of its kind in the Czech Republic. During the day it would be used by company employees, at night and on weekends by apartment owners. We would thus make maximum use of all parking stalls, plus drivers would pay only for the hours they actually use the parking,” adds Matěj Pokorný, Key Account Manager at Sharry.
