Park and Joy – sensors now report free parking spaces in Hamburg

The smartphone application shows free downtown parking facilities. Users can pay for the parking ticket with their cell phone, thus saving a trip to the pay station. Deutsche Telekom is now rolling out a new sensor network for this digital parking service. This month Deutsche Telekom started installing sensors on parking spaces in downtown Hamburg. Using innovative wireless technology, the sensors provide information on free parking spaces. The first 100 connected parking sensors are now being installed in the Wandsbek district, with up to 11,000 sensors planned in the entire Hamburg downtown area through the end of 2019.

“Residents and the city administration benefit from digital services such as our parking app. We spend an average 20 minutes looking for a parking space. This clogs up roads and increases exhaust emissions in the city center. Here we aim to provide a solution with Park and Joy. We are delighted to use in Hamburg our new parking sensor network extensively for the first time,” says Oliver Bahns, head of Connected Mobility at T-Systems, adding: “Other major cities are also set to benefit from the new service. The aim is to make the app usable throughout Germany.” Cities looking to roll out the digital parking management system this year in conjunction with Deutsche Telekom include Bonn, Darmstadt, Dortmund, Duisburg, Hagen and Moers.

For the City of Hamburg, the introduction of smart parking is an important element in its strategy for using Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Bernd Krösser, State Councilor of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg for Internal Affairs, underlines the importance: “As host of the ITS World Congress 2021 we are going to use all the technical resources to minimize for local residents the congestion associated with cars looking somewhere to park. The upshot is less stress and lower emissions. An intelligent traffic infrastructure is key to becoming a model city for smart mobility and smart city logistics solutions.”

Dr. Jörg Oltrogge, Head of the State Office for Transport in Hamburg, points to the next expansion stages of the digital parking system: “Predicting the availability of parking spaces will make it much easier for employees, residents and tourists to move around Hamburg. The planned link between park-and-ride and public transportation – with bus & train – or even bicycles paves the way for new unprecedented digital models in Germany. Better and, above all, predictable use of the transport infrastructure is a major plus for all transport users, while the City gets an effective management tool.”

The Park and Joy app has been available in the app stores since last fall. Since then it has been used for billing parking by the minute in Hamburg. The new Parking Space (P) app function was added in early 2018. The P function in Park and Joy highlights those areas in gray where you are likely to find a parking space near your destination. Various data sources, such as anonymized Deutsche Telekom network usage data, weather or calendar data are fed into the prediction. To provide a high-quality prediction, Deutsche Telekom is installing parking sensors which send information on parking space occupancy via narrowband radio technology, the so-called Narrowband Internet of Things network. The information from the parking sensors should be incorporated into the system before the end of this summer, making it even easier and more accurate to find a free parking space. Sensors for NB-IoT use minimal amounts of power yet have a long range.