Cleverciti's Participation in Sofa Summits

Last Wednesday, on April 14th, our CEO Thomas Hohenacker & COO David Parker spoke at the Sofa Summits - Smart City Summit on:

"The Fastest Path to a 15-minute City. How Cologne Cut Parking Search by 45% to Minimise Congestion"

The talk, as part of the Sustainable Cities - Transportation and Mobility Track, was focused on one of the world’s most innovative and modern parking guidance systems for residents and visitors that was installed in the Cologne district of Nippes last year. The first results of the project have shown parking search time decrease by 45%.

We were joined by a long list of leading and innovative smart cities, such as the City of Rome, Hannover, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Zürich, Helsinki, Rotterdam, Göteborg, Dortmund, Winterthur, Lahti, Geneva, Dublin and Madrid, to name a few.

During the event, several overall polls were released for all attendees to weigh in on - when asked what was the main goal for their smart city, 50% of the respondents answered with ‘sustainability,’ 47.1% with ‘quality of life’ and 2.9% with ‘innovation.’

We are happy to see major smart cities prioritizing sustainability and citizen quality of life — 2 facets we have seen improve quickly with the deployment of smart parking, like the case in Cologne.

We’d like to thank all attendees for joining and for their active participation, and for making the event successful.

If you missed it, but would like to hear more about the installation in Cologne, please find the presentation deck or watch the live session recording below.

Read the slide deck that was used during the presentation:

Learn more

Or watch the full recording:

Sofa Summits Sustainable Cities - Transportation and Mobility | Cleverciti - Smart City Parking

Are Smart Cities Sustainable?

The short answer is: yes, they can be (even more sustainable than non-smart cities). The longer, more complex, answer is: Smart cities have the potential to make a significant contribution to urban sustainability, by using information and communication technology (ICT) to gather urban data and improve performance and management.

How? By applying smart solutions such as smart parking, smart lighting, smart building, air quality monitoring, refuse collection, renewable energy, water infrastructure, and energy grids.

In fact, smart parking has turned out to be one of the fastest and easiest solutions to achieve sustainability in a city.

What are Smart Solutions?

A smart solution is a general term commonly used to describe systems that combine innovative information and communication technologies (e.g., Internet of Things), and apply them in all aspects of life, such as smart devices (TVs, phones), but also smart offices, cars, or even complete cities.

A concrete example of a smart solution that helps cities control their carbon footprint and reduce their CO2 emissions is air quality monitoring. Monitoring air quality in cities helps in assessing the level of pollution in relation to the ambient air quality standards.

In order to build successful smart city solutions, three key steps are necessary:

1. The technology base has to include networks of connected devices and sensors, such as smartphones connected by high-speed communication networks.
2. Smart applications and data analysis capabilities are used to translate the raw data gathered from these devices and sensors into alerts, insights, and ultimately, actions.
3. A wide adoption of applications and usage by cities, companies, and the public, together with the effective management of data, is needed to inspire better decisions and behavior change.

Conclusion

Smart parking is extremely important for the development of smart cities and part of the reason why smart cities tend to be more sustainable than non-smart cities. To us at Cleverciti, it is perfectly clear that smart cities are the future and we are eager to contribute to a better and more sustainable future by developing the best smart parking solutions for our customers around the world. Curious to see how our smart parking systems can be applied in your city? Schedule a demo below:

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