Thanks to the city’s utility company “Split Parking”, Split will soon be the first city in Croatia, and one of the few in Europe, to have an innovative new mobile application for parking.
With this application, drivers will, at all times, have information on free parking, be able to pay for parking by a credit card, and call a tow truck if your car is, for example, fenced in by another car, reports Slobodna Dalmacija on January 18, 2017.
As Hina exclusively revealed, the director of “Split Parking” Marko Bartulić has already signed a contract for the application under the Split information company “Profico”. The price of the application will cost slightly less than half a million kuna.
The pilot project should already be set up a in a month on Domovinskog rata with thirty parking spaces which will be tested over four weeks. If the test goes to plan, the application will cover the entire city.
While on-street parking spaces will be installed with ”sensors”, off-street parking lots and garages will have LED lights and traffic lights which will be visible to drivers upon entering to see if there are available parking spaces.
“The cooperation started with our vision to solve the problems of parking in the city which involved construction and increasing the capacity of parking by introducing the latest technologies that are currently on the world market. One of these technologies is the ‘sensor’ or the marking of parking spaces with sensors so that citizens will be able to see where the empty parking spaces are in the city through the mobile application, at any time.
The modernization of the system has great advantages, including that future users will not need to circle the city to find a vacant spot – spending fuel and time while polluting the environment – and for the first time there is analytical and statistical data to prove it.
Such similar technology that covers an entire city can be seen in Europe only in France and Switzerland,” explained Bartulić, who added that they were very glad that Split could have the first of such mobile applications in Croatia.
“Sensors” will be set so that each parking place sensor will be read by means of electromagnetic and infrared modes. A successful reading will be 98%.
While parking in Split can now be paid via SMS, thanks to the new mobile app there will be no additional costs charged by telecommunication operators and payments can be done by a credit card.
“We’ll change the focus of the towing service so that it will work after a citizen calls through the mobile application to report illegal parking. We will try to make communal approaches, pedestrian crossings, bus stops and places for people with disabilities free. We will try to focus on communal order, while the urban neighborhoods will be visited by invitation of the citizens. Citizen Alerts on your mobile app will be anonymous,” explained Bartulić.
“Split Parking” intends to build a garage in Sućidar, Mertojak, on Vrazova street and reconstruct “Dvornikovi dvori”. They have prepared a complete documentation of the project to construct 13 new garages with a total capacity of 2,500 parking spaces, but due to the temporary financing of the city budget, the project has been put on hold.
To resolve the chronic lack of parking spaces, they are also considering “rotary garages” to accommodate more vehicles in a much smaller space. In addition, they have ordered four new towing vehicles that will be smaller and narrower in order to pass through the streets in the city center.
