City of Greenville launches Downtown Garage Parking Occupancy Monitoring System with Nwave’s Car Counting
Problem
The City of Greenville, SC, is a vibrant community with 7,000 parking spaces across ten garages that serve businesses, hotels, and the general public in the downtown area. The City developed its parking inventory system using car counting to monitor and report real-time parking availability across all the garages to direct the public to garages with available parking spaces.
Without the Parking Occupancy System, drivers would frequently drive to a particular garage only to find no spaces available – losing time, causing congestion, and contributing to excessive greenhouse emissions.
The City needed a system with minimal upfront costs, limited new infrastructure, and separation from its IT network. The system had to be configurable in real-time to account for the City’s contracted spaces commitments with hotels, businesses, and general use.
The City already had a gated payment solution installed in all garages but needed an alternative system focused on counting to overcome a range of deficiencies they experienced with the current system. Among those are regular public events during which gates are lifted and counts lost, leaving the on-site parking officers without current counts requiring manual recounts after every such event. The new system had to continue counting even with the gates open, providing the real-time count, and minimizing the manual recounts.
During public events, lanes in some garages are reversed to allow more efficient traffic management, and the system had to handle this as well. In addition, when the gates are raised, the in and out lanes are used by people coming and going by foot into and out of the facility. The City needed to eliminate false detection events related to foot traffic.
Solution
With Nwave Car Counting, the City can monitor 50 lanes in ten garages, processing more than 9,000 vehicles using the garages daily to provide data in near real-time to the City and its drivers.
Nwave’s Wireless Counting system met all the City’s requirements:
- Quick and easy to install
- Low upfront costs
- 99%+ vehicle detection accuracy
- Easy count corrections to reflect manual counts
- Real-time, easily configurable by the City’s staff to address varying contracted commitments
- Working on 4G internet, keeping the system separate from the City’s IT
- In/Out direction can be easily and quickly reversed
- Nwave sensors do not react to people walking near or over the sensor
Please see our Wireless Counting PGS page for more details on the system.
Driver Dashboard is updated every 30-seconds for a 24-7 view of parking availability.
In addition to the real-time count for each garage, the dashboard provides an intuitive “traffic light” occupancy indicator for each garage, helping drivers avoid full garages and navigate to garages with available parking with linked Google Maps. The system is available on desktop and mobile.
See the City’s Driver Parking Dashboard.
Nwave Dashboard Analytics provide real-time and historical occupancy
Nwave’s Dashboard Analytics provides essential historical and real-time information to the City:
- Current occupancy
- Current utilization
- Occupancy history
- Unitization history
- Utilization heatmap
- In/Out statistics
Historical parking data is available for the previous 24 hours, 48 hours, 7 days, or any custom period.
Nwave’s dashboard provides quick access for occupancy and capacity correction for each facility.
See Nwave in action
The City has featured this new system in the local news and via “Say farewell to your “garage full” frustrations” LinkedIn post, as well as on their FaceBook and Instagram accounts.
The solution was also presented at the 2023 Carolinas Parking & Mobility Association Annual Conference: “Managing Parking Inventory through Smart Parking Systems- Simple Solutions Produce Results“. You can see the presentation here.