What does developing a ‘green city’ entail?
It begins with building the foundation of a smart city. A smart city is categorized as a developed ecosystem that allows citizens, residents, investors and visitors to use technology to function at a maximized level of operation across all industries.
This concept allows all sectors of the community – government, transportation, and society to use technology and communication to enable smart governance, smart mobility, and smart living.
This gives way to developing a green city. Green cities are designed to support sustainable living with an effort to reduce carbon dioxide levels and overall environment impact. It’s estimated that about 50 percent of the world’s population now live in urban developments.
A major facet of advancing sustainable living is innovating methods of transportation. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “buildup of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases like methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) is causing the Earth’s atmosphere to warm, resulting in changes to the climate we are already starting to see today.” Twenty-seven percent of emissions of such greenhouse gases are directly linked to transportation.
The transportation industry is easily one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gases. A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
Idling plays a significant role in the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. Idling occurs when a driver allows their vehicle to run at zero or low speeds. This occurs daily with millions of vehicles across the United States. With an estimate of a loss of “between 1/5 to 7/10 of a gallon of fuel an hour,” it’s also an expensive act. Idling can sometimes be unpreventable with slow moving traffic but a main component of idling is parking.
For every 10 minutes an engine is turned off, one pound of carbon dioxide is prevented from being released. Americans on average spend 17 hours idling by looking for parking. This adds up to 17,000 pounds of preventable emitted carbon dioxide gases. In overpopulated urban sprawls such as New York City, drivers spend an average of 107 hours searching for parking.
Solutions such as the ParkMobile app offer a sustainable answer to this idling issue. The app offers smart parking with a mobile parking solution.
Users of the app pay for parking using their mobile devices. Entering zone numbers into the app, users can quickly choose their parking spot to prevent idling while looking for coins or cards to pay for parking. Additionally, the app has developed many innovations to cut down the time and energy spent into looking for parking.
The newest feature, parking availability, helps drivers quickly navigate to areas where there is more open parking, and avoid areas where there is no parking. With availability in more than 100 cities across the United States, this feature aims to save users fuel, expenses and contribution to the emission of greenhouse gases.
USA Today reports that 63 percent of drivers avoid “driving to shopping sites, airports, leisure or sports centers, and other destinations due to parking challenges.” For this issue, ParkMobile developed reservation parking. The feature, available in the app, allows users to reserve parking ahead of time to prevent wasted time idling around looking for a parking spot. Users additionally can use parkmobile.io to directly book reservation parking for stadiums, venues, airports and universities.
ParkMobile provides integrated services in all-new BMW vehicles. Using the GPS system, drivers can access the ParkMobile platform allowing them to find, reserve, and pay for parking.
Solutions like ParkMobile are aiming to reduce and curb the emissions of greenhouse gases through innovative product solutions that provide a more sustainable system. Smart parking is the future.
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