Project type                                                           Parking Management

Promoter                                                                MOTIVATE Project

Collaborators                                                         Ioannina council

Start date                                                                2018

Funding                                                                  Interreg-MED

Website                                                                  www.motivate.interreg-med.edu

The pressure of traffic in Mediterranean cities keeps growing, draining existing parking resources and increasing congestion and pollution. For years, parking management systems and smart parking concepts were studied and implemented by municipalities, like in Ioannina, which provides a low-cost smart parking system. Smart parking consists of an advanced real-time navigation system that signals availability and directs the user towards the parking space closest to the destination chosen.

This App helps reduce congestion and environmental pollution caused by private vehicles while trying to locate parking space in the city. The key to a successful action was to connect the MOTIVATE Platform with existing mobility Apps.

MOTIVATE PROJECT

MOTIVATE promotes Citizens’ active involvement in the development of Sustainable travel plans in MED cities with seasonal demand.

Policy makers often do not have a detailed picture of the main mobility problems that residents and tourists face during their daily displacements. Receiving user’s feedback would facilitate them to have a better understanding of the situation.

The main objective is to involve citizens and visitors in transport data collection and management. With this information, decision-makers will be able to elaborate more targeted and efficient SUMPs but also they will have the capability to monitor, evaluate and update them according to specific user’s needs.

The main project’s outputs will be: (a) Development of the MOTIVATE e-platform (b) Testing Report on social media exploitation in SUMP development (c) Transferability methodology, processes, techniques and protocols & training course on the use of social media and crowdsourcing techniques for SUMP’s implementation

RELEVANCE

Involving residents and visitors in the data collection about their displacements would facilitate to have a better understanding of the situation. With this Data, Urban Mobility Plans could give a better answer to the specific user’s daily needs.

The parking control system ensures management of short-term parking by visitors and long-term parking by permanent residents and to eliminate the phenomena of illegal parking and double parking. The implementation of this system provided several benefits, in particular: servicing short-term parking,  servicing permanent residents of the central area, discouraging the use of private cars; vehicle from the workers in the central area in order to release seats for visitors, eliminate illegal parking and double parking phenomena in order to ensure a smooth flow of traffic and finally, a significant improvement in the standard of living, achieved by faster fulfilment of citizens’ obligations, prudent use of vehicles and the use of alternative means of transport, such as public transport and the bicycle.