Parking smart
Following the success of the first annual Disruptive Technologies UK Conference and Expo, Portal spoke to AppyParking CEO and founder Dan Hubert, who here discusses the ever-growing potential of intelligent transport solutions
Disruptive technologies are big business. From the mobile internet to 3D printing, next-generation genomics to the Cloud, and autonomous vehicles to the internet of things, emerging and innovative technologies are not only revolutionising the way we live, work and play but also transforming our economy. It is timely, then, that in September 2016, the Wellcome Collection, London, played host to the first annual Disruptive Technologies UK Conference and Expo, a one-day event which saw innovation leaders, business professionals and technology experts from industries across the globe come together to examine the innumerable possibilities and challenges presented by disruptive technologies.
Speaking at the conference, which Portal attended as media partner, was Dan Hubert, the CEO and founder of AppyParking, an easy-to-use app which makes city parking hassle-free by showing you which spaces are nearest to you, what they cost, whether they’re available and which restrictions might apply – whether on street or off street, in a car or on a motorcycle, at any time of the day.
Here, Hubert talks to Portal about the importance of open data, why London has a way to go before it can truly call itself a smart city, and the potential of mobility-as-a-service.
Services such as Uber, as well as AppyParking, are leading the smart city, connected car revolution. How do you see this technology evolving in the future?
At the moment, intelligent transport systems are hugely fragmented. Everyone is trying to do siloed solutions, especially in the world of parking, and there is no connected data, no continuous flow of information across boroughs, never mind from the public and the private sector. What therefore needs to be created is a platform that aggregates all of this data and creates all the facilities that feed into mobility-as-a-service.
It’s about more than just parking restrictions then; it’s about loading restrictions, it’s about test parking, it’s about dynamic data, i.e. sensors to indicate when a loading bay is free etc. And it has to be open: open datasets and open platforms that can feed into multiple application programming interfaces (APIs) and into the dashboards of autonomous cars.
It’s a big opportunity. By 2025, the mobility-as-a-service market will be worth some £900bn (~€1,067bn) globally – so it’s a huge market and it’s growing.
Is there a role, then, for Europe to start making more of its data truly open?
Absolutely, yes. That’s been the common problem: if you want to achieve mobility-as-a-service, then you have to have an open platform. Transport for London (TfL) has invested a lot of money into producing an open API that firms can tap into and dress however they want. That’s a great example, and there needs to be more.
AppyParking began in London, which is keen to position itself at the forefront of the smart city revolution. What can other cities learn from London’s example?
I wouldn’t regard London as a smart city just yet – in fact far from it. London’s actually one of the hardest cities to crack because there’s just so much red tape. It has 33 local authorities, as well as TfL, who basically have ownership over red routes and public transport etc. which results in a huge amount of bureaucracy.
It’s a similar picture in the rest of the country. There are over 400 councils across the United Kingdom, each with their own separate budgets and their own departments doing their own thing; if they were all to club together and compile their money into one centralised system – a single government body dictating top down (by carrot incentive rather than stick) – then they could streamline the entire process and we would get much smarter, much quicker.
You can already see that in Bristol, Edinburgh and Milton Keynes, all of whom are doing forward-facing smart solutions, but London isn’t there yet.
© Callum Hopkins
AppyParking is now available in a number of UK cities. Have you encountered any unique challenges moving between cities?
A lot of it is just about education. A lot of councils still don’t quite understand the actual value of opening up their data; they’ve just paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for some sort of mapping or dataset, so naturally they’re protective of it, but if they were to share that data they could reap much greater benefits. By collaborating with others, for example, councils could lower congestion, lower pollution etc. – that’s far more than they’ll achieve with the data alone. That’s what they need to learn, and that’s how we began AppyParking three years ago, by going to every local authority in London and educating them about the advantages of opening up their data.
Another thing councils don’t yet tend to understand is what open data really means. It’s more than simply putting all your desktop files into an FTP site; the data needs to be created in a format that’s consumable. A huge amount of work goes on behind the scenes of what we do to turn other people’s Latin, so to speak, into our Latin – there needs to be one common language.
How do you feel that smart technology could be better integrated into the road and transport planning processes when it comes to improving the design of facilities and services or even transport policies?
Having sensors on the road increases the efficiency and occupancy of each bay, and, once you’ve organised that data it also allows you to implement dynamic pricing. That should be an integral part of the infrastructure, because it allows you to actually start to channel and direct traffic. Essentially, then, you’re able to push cars out of the town at certain times of the day.
To give you an example, we did a trial in Westminster which reduced parking times from 20 minutes to 30 seconds, simply by having technology sensors in the car and on the road – that’s a massive efficiency increase.
What obstacles are there now in the UK, and perhaps in Europe more broadly, standing in the way of getting these smart technologies in place and communicating with each other?
It comes back to that legacy way of thinking, legacy systems and legacy contracts. Margaret Thatcher invented the tender process to create a fair, competitive plan for anyone working with local authorities, but that has actually resulted in them having exclusive five-year contracts for some legacy systems that are already redundant. It’s a case, then, of just waiting for these contracts to end.
Cashless parking is one example. It takes people 15 minutes to work out where they are, download the app, work out what credit card they want to use etc. and all that’s due to fragmentation. But if the councils were to say that system can’t be exclusive, it has to be an open portal with multiple vendors offering multiple services, then that would open up a competitive market again, in which it is the best service that wins. That would then feed into the whole mobility process.
Finally, you’ve recently received support from both Microsoft and Ford. How would you assess the level of support, both financial and otherwise, that’s currently available for turning innovative ideas into disruptive innovation?
We won a Microsoft accelerator programme, which resulted in free mentorship, free office space for nearly two years, free access to accounts, cloud-based products, and an open black book of enterprise clients. In return, we became loyal to the huge power and network that is Microsoft.
Ford is meanwhile opening up a number of mobility challenges across the world, in which they’re inviting young start-ups with bright ideas to help provide solutions to the mobility problem. We entered one such congestion competition in London and won a $10,000 (~€8,958) prize, which at that stage in our start-up life granted us an extra six months. That was obviously great for us.
Having faith in smaller companies is essential, and corporate investment and corporate venturing have totally twigged onto this, because today’s little bright things are going to be the big brands of tomorrow, so it makes a lot of sense for corporates to get involved early.
Dan Hubert
Founder, CEO
AppyParking
This article first appeared in issue 12 of Horizon 2020 Projects: Portal, available here.
