Smart Parking in Tulln: IoT Helps Find Parking Lots Faster

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.

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.

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.