Hamsterdam

Last week I returned home from Intertraffic 2006.  I’d never been there before.  If you’re a parking junkie like me then I could only describe this expo as the Disneyworld of Parking, held every two years in Amsterdam.  Perhaps that makes it more Euro-Disney instead, except with more attendees.

Sometimes when I travel my kids ask where I’m going.  And they quickly lose interest when I drag out the map or globe to show them.  So this is the conversation we had:

Kid 1:  “Where are you going?”
Me:  “It’s a place called Amsterdam.”
Kid 1:  “Hamsterdam?”
Me:  “No, Amsterdam.”
Kid 2:  “Is that like a Beaver Dam?”
Me:  “Umm, well, they have lots of water and dams there.”
Kid 1:  “Is Hamsterdam where hamsters were invented?”
Me:  “I don’t think so.”
Kid 2:  “Dam is a bad word you know.  You shouldn’t say it.”
Me:  “That’s right.”

But I digress… back to Intertraffic…

First of all, it’s overwhelmingly huge.  It’s like six IPI tradeshows all at once.  The expo runs for 4 days, and in that time there’s no possible way to see everything.  I planned my booth-visitation-route in meticulous detail and still barely managed to get through it all.

Intertraffic also runs some presentations concurrently with the show; I caught only a couple of these but the real draw here is the expo, not the sessions.

Parking is actually just a portion of the show, maybe around 35%.  The rest is traffic-related stuff.  I checked out some cool traffic things but the truth is that the parking booths alone took the majority of my time.

So what about the cool new technology in parking?

It’s a bit of a mixed bag.  I’m afraid to say that I saw very little that would qualify as cool new technology.  There’s a lot of technology, some cool, but little new.

Pay and Display, Pay by Space

One of the biggest segments at the show was Pay & Display devices.  It seems like everyone had one.  They’re all online and connected nowadays – the age of batch operations seems to have given way to real-time remote transactions – and they’re all basically variations on the same theme.  I actually asked one vendor what makes his equipment different than the others.  He looked at me funny.  I clarified:  “What compels a customer to purchase your equipment over the next guy?” I asked.  He wasn’t able to answer.  Perhaps he didn’t speak my language.

There was some innovation, however.  One device from Metric is used to register and pre-pay for London congestion charges and actually includes a pushbutton keyboard so the user can enter a license plate.  This was cool, and beats the snot out of using a numeric keyboard for text entry (if you’ve ever tried to send a text message with a typical cell-phone keypad, you’ll know what I’m talking about).

Most of the P&D devices are now offering remote, real-time monitoring as well.  Since the data is centralized at a server somewhere it’s also possible to use an Internet browser, either on a desktop or on a PDA, to get current information about paid and unpaid stalls.  This aids in knowing when the machines are offline, where your enforcement should be targeted, or when the machine is so full of cash it’s about to burst (okay, admittedly most of them are using real-time credit card authorization so there’s even less cash to worry about and the bursting isn't really a problem).

Finally, from a parker’s perspective there was also the option to “top up” the paid parking by going to any P&D station on the network and adding time to your current stall without zeroing out any remaining time that you have - this was done by entering a code from your previous P&D ticket.  Frankly, I could see this as being more valuable from your phone, but the logic is the same coming from a phone or coming from another P&D box – only the convenience of the location is different.

Vehicle Detection and Guidance

How do you know when there’s a car present?  Or where it’s going?  Most popular in the parking business has been the use of the induction loop (or just The Loop as it is best known).

Let’s talk about The Loop for a second.  It’s cheap – after all, we’re basically talking about a hunk of wire and a simple circuit board.  Installation is where the cost is… digging a groove into the concrete and having to maintain it.  Oh, and it’s pretty easy to trick the Loop with two cars tailgating so manufacturers invent tricks like recognizing “leading edge signals” and so forth.  For more info on how loops work check out this page.

Several other technical options are now available.  Unfortunately, from what I saw demonstrated, the price of the devices and/or installing them is going to exceed that of our friend The Loop.  Nevertheless there were some cool alternatives if you're willing to pay a little more.

One such alternative is the ultra-sonic sensor.  Just like bats and whales uses echolocation to judge distances, so does this sensor.  Mounted overhead (or sideways) it can very accurately measure the distance between itself and the ground, so it knows when something is present under the sensor.  And even cooler than this, when matched up with software from Nortech it can determine the type of vehicle it’s detecting, based on the pattern made as the vehicle drives up: cars tend to be low at the front, higher in the middle, then low at the back again; vans are sloped upward at the front and drop off quickly at the back.

Another possibility is the ultra-sensitive magneto-resistor from Banner.  This device, about half the size of a deck of cards, operates like a little magnetic antenna  detecting any metal in its radius.  You can adjust the sensitivity to ignore small metal things like bicycles, or crank it up to register every penny dropped on the ground.

I think the coolest of the bunch, however, was an RFID-based detector from Nedap.  The idea here is to know which parking stalls in your garage might be empty or full, so you put a little detector in each space.  (I envisioned that these detectors would talk to an RFID hub in the ceiling, each hub receiving a signal from 30 or 40 parking stalls - there’s a Canadian company working on something like this - but such was not the case here.)  Each coffee-cup-sized device mounted in a stall wirelessly passes its status on to it’s neighboring device one stall over, and so on down the aisle until the last device transmits to a brain that is hooked up to the network.  This daisy chain allows the occupancy of hundreds of stalls to be monitored with minimal wiring or power requirements, using the same principles of smart dust.  If you ask me, this registers pretty high on the cool technology scale!

Access Control

Generally I’ve been pretty down on the access control guys, with their dearth of innovation and claims that RS-422 serial communication is the only reliable way to communicate over a long distance.

The regular collection of access control vendors were at the show (I won’t cite them all here; it’s too long a list and I know I’ll miss one and get slagged for it).  I will say, however, that I sense an undercurrent of excitement and energy in access control systems that hasn’t been present for many years.

TCP/IP communications – used for reliable Internet communications for, oh, only the last 35 years – is becoming the standard for access control equipment as well.  It's about time.  Gates talk IP.  Readers talk IP.  Pay-on-foot stations talk IP.  Even the intercoms are using Voice over IP now, with one company having the forethought to create a registered trademark using this technology over an intercom.

The devices themselves are also getting cooler.  Today’s access control system manages gates, but has the capability of running bollards, fences, doors, and myriad other devices that are well beyond the scope of parking.

The credential used for parking is also evolving.  It’s not about yet-another-card-in-your-wallet-or-device-in-your-car but rather using a device of your choosing as your access credential.  One promising technology is Near Field Communications, a short range device built into some newer cell-phones and PDAs.

So what differentiates one access control company from the next?  I can think of a few examples from the show:  Hardware reliability is a must.  Modular design.  Having a clear vision for the future.  Fashionable equipment (I’ll specifically give props to SkiData on this one).  And customer service… yes, even the access control manufacturers are starting to realize that it’s the end-user - not the distributor – that is their ultimate consumer.

License Plate Recognition

This is one technology that just can’t seem to get its act together.  It’s a horribly inefficient, expensive, accuracy-challenged way to identify a car.  You’d only use it when dealing with transient parking (admittedly a very large piece of the parking puzzle for most of us) because once you have a registered parker you’re going to encourage them to adopt a permit, RFID tag, or some other easier-to-detect media.

For those of you uninformed about LPR, it basically means taking an image of a license plate and converting it to understandable text.  Humans easily convert images to text – heck, we do it for fun when trying to decipher a particularly cryptic personalized plate – but computers struggle with the simple task of converting images to text.  Half the time the computer can’t even differentiate between the license plate and a bumper sticker!

In Europe it’s easier to do LPR than in North America.  The license plates tend to be less muddled with background images and odd-ball character sizes and directions, so LPR provides higher recognition rates there.  Oh, and the national registries of plates, rather than at the state or municipal level also helps keep consistency there, choosing colors that are complementary (black on orange) or providing reflective coating on only the characters.

I spoke with no less than six different companies using LPR (also ALPR, as in Automated) with various algorithms and capabilities for plate recognition.  They all said that the hardware – not the software – is the key to getting a successful recognition.  Many of them recommended using multiple images (color and infrared) to get the best initial image.

Nevertheless, in the relationship between transient parkers and parking proprietors, I think demand for LPR solutions (handheld-based, access control based) will continue to grow.  Successful recognition rates will creep up slowly as newer algorithms and more computing intelligence is thrown at the problem.  And then eventually when all vehicles and/or plates offer built-in computer readable tagging, this will all become moot.

Conclusion

If you’re still reading – whew, thanks for hanging in there - then you’ve learned about some of the more interesting things I found at the show.

Other, less neat parking discoveries that I investigated:

• handheld computers (nothing new here)
• barriers (snooze)
• paper products (double-snooze!)
• automated garages (rare)
• facility management companies (yecch)
• various hardware components (keypads and readers and card swipes, oh my!)
• single space meters (apparently they’re self-enforcing now)

I was talking to a German visitor at the show about his opinion of the expo.  He said it was his fourth time to Intertraffic, and that innovation seems to alternate between shows, as if there’s a two year cycle for new products.  Unfortunately this year seemed to be the “off” year.  Interesting… if his assertion holds true then I’m definitely looking forward to Intertraffic 2008 in Hamsterdam.

P.S.  If you're wondering about my non-work time:  I did visit the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum (big thanks to Sandra and Tom for spending the day with me!), checked out a real-live working windmill.  And before you ask:  Yes, I walked through the red-light district at night.  And and also stuck my head into one of the more interesting "coffee shops" - but I swear I never inhaled!  ;-)

Comments

[Blake Laufer]

Stan, thanks for your message.

Yes, I'll be attending IPI in Vegas (see next post) but I don't planning on getting back to Arizona any time soon.

As for my "verbal meandering" - that's a good name for it. I've also heard it called "verbal diarrhea" but I like your term better.

[Stan Long]

You do get around. If you make it to Vegas
and happen back through Arizona, would enjoy
seeing you again. Thanks to my son, Steve, I
logged on to your website and enjoy your
verbal meandering. Yes, I'm still very much alive.

regards, Stan Long