As the silly season fast approaches, the TRANStech Awards on Friday 1st November gave us the perfect opportunity to look back on our successes throughout 2019. Sat amongst other trailblazers and pioneers of mobility in the glittering Royal Lancaster Hotel, the AppyWay team welcomed local authority partners Harrogate Borough Council and Coventry City Council, and reflected on two of our most significant projects to date.
Harrogate – Street of the Future
At the start of this year we launched our first Smart City Parking in the Yorkshire town of Harrogate. In partnership with Visa, Harrogate Borough Council and North Yorkshire County Council, this world-first initiative provides real-time availability, seamless pay-as-you-go payments for users and a powerful kerbside utilisation tool for the local authority. With almost a year under its belt, Smart City Parking has yielded a number of benefits for the residents, visitors and businesses of Harrogate. Residents and visitors to the town found that the real-time bay availability offered by the solution reduced the time they spent looking for a parking space. They also found that payment via the app was more convenient than using a pay & display machine and the smart city parking solution, in particular our One Click Parking technology, alleviated the stress associated with an expiring pay & display ticket.
With Harrogate successfully implemented, we have been busy rolling out further towns. Halifax went live at the start of November and hot on the heels of Halifax is our biggest city yet, Portsmouth. It’s amazing that other towns are recognising the benefits of this scheme. Residents staying longer, shopping longer, dining longer and regenerating their high streets. That’s why it’s truly an honour that this solution was awarded Street of the Future at the TRANStech Awards 2019. For Harrogate and Halifax the future is now and we are proud to have celebrated this award next to our colleagues from Harrogate Borough Council.
Mapper – solving today’s problems in partnership with local authorities
Our other solution that was in the running for two awards was our Innovate UK funded project, Mapper. Whilst Mapper did not come away with any awards we are still immensely proud of the team, our partners and the outcome of the project. Mapper began life as The Parking Platform, the Innovate UK project to build an authoritative source of standardised, map-based traffic order data that is cloud hosted, scaleable and interoperable with legacy systems. Built in partnership with Cambridgeshire County Council, Coventry City Council and Milton Keynes Council, Mapper has been designed to solve local authorities most pressing problems whilst also enabling them to move to a digital platform that is fit for the future of mobility.
It is a highly intuitive tool that provides fully standardised data formats with an output available via API. Mapper revolutionises the way local governments engage with their constituents. Through our industry leading Public Consultation Portal the public are able to view the entire traffic order scheme via a user friendly and publicly understood map and provide feedback to their authority. Mapper and the Public Consultation Portal is already making significant waves amongst local authorities. Compared to their current solution, local authorities have told us that using Mapper and the portal is 83% quicker and 83% cheaper than their current process.
Both of these solutions, regardless of whether they won or not, are benefiting the communities they are used in. Each has been designed to enable authorities to turn information into impact, where policy decisions can be made based on the data and insights our solutions provide.
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.
