Smart Parking in Tulln: IoT Helps Find Parking Lots Faster

31.10.2022 by Annalena Rauen

Man in car on a cycle track looking for somewhere to park


 

Smart parking sensors help motorists to find somewhere to park faster. How residents and visitors to the small Austrian town of Tulln benefit from the IoT and a Magenta Telekom smart parking pilot project.

From the Gardens of Tulln to the late Baroque Minorite Church or the unique Donaubühne, an open-air theater on the bank of the Danube, the Lower Austrian city of Tulln has an international reputation for the wide range of art and culture it offers. In 2021 Tulln, population 17,000, welcomed a record three million visitors.

In addition to its high quality of life and leisure the district capital is an important turntable for the entire region. With two main railroad stations, numerous bus connections and bicycle-friendly traffic planning, Tulln is a university and garden city of short distances. Yet locals and tourists alike still frequently rely on cars to go about their daily business or to drive there from the surrounding area or from abroad.

Occupancy Data from Cloud Makes Parking Lot Search More Efficient

To make it easier for motorists to find somewhere to park, the municipality had a digital solution in mind. Joining forces with Magenta Telekom, it launched a smart parking pilot project. Deutsche Telekom subsidiary Magenta Telekom installed smart parking sensors on an initial 27 asphalted parking lots. Using infrared technology, the IoT sensors recognize whether the parking spaces are free or occupied.

Built-in wireless modules relay occupancy data to a Cloud platform via the NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) machine and sensor network. The NB-IoT cellular network standard is designed for power-saving transmission of small data packets on the Internet of Things (IoT). The modules can run without maintenance for several years on a conventional battery. At the entrance to the parking lots a solar-powered LED screen indicates whether spaces are available.

Smart Parking Is to Optimize Tulln’s Parking Lot Offering

By means of the smart parking pilot project Tulln aims to find out how it can gear its parking lot offering more efficiently to the needs of residents and visitors. The solution might later be extended to include additional services and further information. App users might, for example, be able to see in real time where free parking spaces are available. A push notification would tell them in time that their parking ticket is about to expire, and motorists would save the time and fuel cost of looking for somewhere to park.


 


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To meet the challenges of climate change business and the civil society must tackle ambitious targets. With the Internet of Things companies can make a decisive contribution – and save on valuable raw materials too.

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To meet the challenges of climate change business and the civil society must tackle ambitious targets. With the Internet of Things companies can make a decisive contribution – and save on valuable raw materials too.

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Curvy country road in forest from bird's eye view
Annalena Rauen
Annalena Rauen

Marketing Manager IoT

Back in 2016, Anna worked on IoT topics at Deutsche Telekom for the first time. Since then, she has been supporting customer best practices in a wide range of industries – always focusing on the benefits that the Internet of Things can provide. Her IoT blogposts describe real use cases and the value these innovations add to market players, their business models, and even entire industries.