TakeMe

Context:

Finding a parking place is essential for the car use to stay more attractive than other transport possibilities. After decades of car favoritism, public policies now aim to reduce the place of cars in the city. There are several reasons to be willing to do so: pollution, well-being in the city with less traffic, etc.

Literature offers a typology of parking users (Claux, 2016). 1/ Residents, people parking their cars on public space when they don’t have private parking lots. The use of this public lot happens at night, but not during the day when they go to work. 2/ Visitors, or consumers, people coming to a specific area only for a few hours. They need to park to run errands, and their presence is necessary to help the city’s economic development. They come on two conditions: good traffic conditions and guarantee of a parking lot. 3/ Commuters, people coming to work during the day.

Parking is a key issue for Rennes Métropole. According to the manager of the traffic regulation and security service at Rennes City & Métropole, their “number one priority is not getting as much money as possible but increase the turn over per place rate” in the city center.

Pains:

After we understood the context, we chose two problem to be resolved at the same time. The lack of control of payment fees of on-street-parking and the lack of a solution that can be scaled in almost 6000 parking spots. The following two paragraphs were taken from the case resume:

The principle of paid parking requires a control of payment fees of on-street-parking. This control is done by the police, who can’t be everywhere every day. Consequently, only ¼ of all fees are paid. “The goal of the métropole is to reach ¾ in the next few years”, mentioned Pierre Aubrée. As previously said, this is not done in the perspective of earning as much money as possible but to increase the turnover per place rate.

In the development process of new solutions, the main constraint of the city is the ‘cost massification’ (concern of Pierre Aubrée as well as Roland Delicado). It means they must consider a solution for almost 6000 places, so they need a solution taking that scale into account. However, it differs from a strict business logic, in the sense that they don’t need to be cost-effective only in a monetary way. The quality of service proposed is also an important criterion, as much as the initial cost.

Solution: TakeMe

The process to find one of the right solution for the problem of parking in the city center of Rennes takes into consideration the following aspect: a solution that can be applied to the current parking areas, a system that can easily manage and scale into the needs of the city and the users, and bring extra value to the user and support the green ideas that the city authorities wants to incentivize.

After many sessions and exercises we came with TakeMe. The first solution based on image and video processing that allows to track and manage all the public and also private parking slots in the city center of Rennes.

TakeMe is a system that tracks all the parking areas and has an app that allows you to find the right parking closest to your final destination. Also, this system manages the payment method by an easy app that can process any kind of credit cards. The following image shows the user interface for Android or IOS device.

Another great asset for our solution is the rewards program. This program allows support for car pooling and motivates you to keep yourself in a good health. Regarding the first, we want that people received discount of the rate for the parking every time that two or more people come in the same car. The idea is to incentivize people to share the car to reduce the number of car in the city center. Regarding the second, we want our users to have a good health, so we are going to count the kilometers they walk after they left their cars. This idea tries to reward those users who do not always take the closest parking place. These award program is one of great value as solution.

However, we also want to offer additional value for a premium customers. We understand that some days we don’t have the time to parking, so we are going to provide someone who is going to park for you. This is how our valet parking service comes into our additional value. The idea is always to make simple the way the user deals with his or her car in the city center. Less time finding a parking lot means less pollution and traffic. Finally, the easy payment method, if the user has our app installed in his or her phone the rest is pretty simple. One click to check-in and one click to check-out and the payment is completed.

Team:

William BERNAL

Daniel LUKACS

Li WU