Blockchain's Role in Revolutionalizing City Parking

Blockchain-powered decentralized parking will offer a feasible solution for various parking issues that plague cities today.

Urban areas across the globe face serious difficulties in finding parking spaces. Studies suggest that looking for parking spaces costs Americans almost $73 billion a year due to wastage of time and fuel. Also, US citizens often overpay for parking spaces, resulting in a total cost of over $20 billion a year. With the help of studies like these, one can understand that finding and paying for parking spaces can be significant challenges in urban areas. Also, the scarcity of parking spots may lead to traffic jams and accidents in crowded locations. Hence, governments must deploy solutions such as blockchain-based decentralized parking to address these issues. However, governments must analyze the existing challenges before deploying a solution.

Analyzing the Challenges with Current Parking Systems

Generally, commuters face major issues while looking for parking spaces. Drivers spend around 107 hours a year looking for parking spaces in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Finding parking spaces can be even more complicated at small concert venues and theaters. Hence, it is evident that public places are running out of sufficient parking spaces for private vehicles. Developing countries have even more serious issues with parking. With a low number of parking spaces, drivers often park their vehicles on the street as well as in no-parking zones. Such parking practices lead to issues such as congestions, road rage, and accidents. Hence, developing countries need an alternative to improve their current parking situations.

In business hubs, the parking lot staff has to manually check the identity of every vehicle owner to prevent the entry of unauthorized vehicles. This process can be time-consuming, leading to high wait times for vehicles owners. Also, hiring employees who can handle various tasks in the parking lot can be expensive for business hubs.

Solving the Crisis with Blockchain-Based Decentralized Parking

The advent of blockchain has revolutionized industries such as media, finance, healthcare, and retail. Similarly, blockchain technology will transform parking by introducing decentralized parking. Using blockchain, a decentralized parking platform can be created to enable vehicle owners to find and reserve parking spots. For this purpose, a parking platform will store data regarding multiple parking facilities in a specific area using a decentralized ledger. The parking facilities have IoT sensors that can notify the platform about empty parking spots in real-time. Similar solutions can be utilized for several urban and rural areas. With such platforms, vehicle owners can be alerted about parking availability in real-time. A decentralized parking platform can navigate drivers to their parking spots and offer real-time updates about traffic congestions. In the case of high traffic congestions, a decentralized parking platform can suggest alternate parking spots to help commuters in reaching their destination on time.

Decentralized parking platforms can accept payments for reservations in fiat or cryptocurrencies with the help of smart contracts. Smart contracts can verify a vehicle owner’s smartphone using the phone’s unique identification code and process payment after identifying the owner. In this manner, smart contracts can ensure that the parking space is allocated to a registered driver and streamline payments. A blockchain-enabled decentralized parking platform can allow parking providers to monetize their parking spot. For this purpose, parking providers can register their open spots and unused spaces on a decentralized parking platform and earn cash or cryptocurrencies for providing parking spaces to drivers. In this manner, urban areas can address the problem of parking space shortage.

Decentralized parking platforms can streamline parking at airports, hospitals, educational institutions, and residential complexes. Additionally, carbon emissions will be reduced as drivers would be capable of finding parking spots in no time. Hence, governments should consider adopting blockchain-enabled decentralized parking to transform parking practices.