Now that the confetti has settled and the team have hung up their dancing shoes we’d like to look back on the glitzy Friday afternoon that was the British Parking Awards 2020. Surrounded by the biggest and brightest names in British parking we waited with bated breath to see whether our two projects, nominated across three awards, were worthy of winning a coveted British Parking Awards trophy.
The ‘Appy news… we won two out the three awards we were nominated for!
Considered the ultimate recognition of excellence and achievement in parking management, design and innovation, it’s a huge honour to be recognised not once, but twice by our industry peers. Our ‘Smart City Parking’ scheme in collaboration with Harrogate Borough Council and North Yorkshire County Council took out the Intelligent Parking Award, and ‘Future Ready Traffic Orders’ in partnership with Innovate UK, Cambridgeshire County Council, Coventry City Council and Milton Keynes Council won the Parking Partnerships Award.
🏆 Intelligent Parking – Smart City Parking in Harrogate
Harrogate Borough Council (HBC) and North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC) were experiencing a number of parking challenges in the Harrogate town centre. These ranged from an increasing demand for parking spaces, poor driver experiences when locating spaces, increased congestion, and lack of data and understanding on how their parking assets were being utilised. They were truly looking for an intelligent solution to mitigate these challenges.
With the world-leading Smart City Parking (SCP) scheme residents and visitors to Harrogate are benefiting from real-time availability and seamless pay-as-you-go payments via the AppyParking mobile app. A year on from launch, drivers are finding parking more quickly, experiencing less stress when compared to using a traditional pay and display machine, and excitedly our statistics are showing that on average, people are parking and enjoying the town for longer.
For the local authorities, the system provides them with complete visibility over their kerbside via an analytics dashboard. Councils are able to see occupancy patterns and payment events that can be monitored in both real-time and historically, enabling an enhanced level of insight over currently available systems. This data has informed parking strategies and helped Harrogate improve the management of parking assets.
Further authorities are adopting the AppyWay SCP scheme with Halifax launching in November and Portsmouth, our biggest city yet, launching in the first half of 2020. HBC and NYCC have recently confirmed the extension of the SCP scheme for a further 12 months as the authorities seek to continue to improve experiences in Harrogate town centre.
To learn more about the results from Harrogate you can sign up to our newsletter and receive the SCP Harrogate annual report straight to your inbox.
🏆 Parking Partnerships – Future Ready Traffic Orders
Starting life as the Innovate UK funded project The Parking Platform, Future Ready Traffic Orders was created in partnership with Cambridgeshire County Council, Coventry City Council and Milton Keynes Council. The outcome of the Parking Platform project, Mapper, is the interface local authorities need to digitally manage Traffic Regulation Orders and Traffic Management Orders, and provide open access to standardised kerbside data. Mapper solves today’s challenges, whilst ensuring authorities have the tools necessary for the future.
Mapper contains a number of features that dramatically speed up the time it takes to create traffic orders and push them through public consultation, these include dynamic map tiles, bulk editor, and the ability to instantly publish fully standardised data online. Thanks to these features, once schemes have been drawn up, officers at local authorities can publish proposals to our industry-leading public consultation with a click of a button. Residents are able to view schemes via a user-friendly map and provide feedback directly to the council. Once traffic order changes complete consultation and are ratified, the data is immediately reflected in the AppyParking mobile app or via our Kerbside API.
During a project wrap up report from Innovate UK, the partners and Innovate UK recorded time and cost savings of up to 83% when compared with current traffic order processes. This saving will drastically improve the ways lcal authorities manage orders and improve the way the parking industry works as a whole.
For more on Mapper and our Public Consultation Portal you can read our case study with Cambridgeshire County Council here.
Huge thanks to our public and private sector partners for enabling us to create these award-winning solutions. And thanks Landor Links for hosting and to the judges for considering and voting towards our submissions.
Our City Partnerships team would love to hear from you and discuss how AppyWay could help experiences in your town. Get in touch with the team today.
Learn more about Smart City Parking here and for more on Mapper click here.
