City Tech Collaborative, Millennium Garages, SP+, and Arrive, have partnered to launch the Millennium Gateway Innovation Lab – a cross-sector consortium to envision and implement technology-enabled solutions that will position parking facilities to address critical urban challenges.
“Physical spaces – like parking garages – hold infinite potential to be an asset to cities beyond their current use,” said Rick West, CEO of Millennium Garages. “Parking garages may become transportation hubs and critical links within multimodal journeys, and we are actively seeking ways to demonstrate new technology-enabled solutions to keep the parking industry relevant and efficient and to be strong partners to cities as they seek to enhance services to their residents.”
The partners are re-imagining parking real estate as a gateway to connect to other modes of travel and services, such as public transit, ride- and vehicle-sharing, electrification, and automation, along with using the properties as freight and logistics hubs.
City Tech will be releasing the Lab’s roadmap to integrate parking solutions across the mobility system later this year. The three-year plan will outline specific areas for solution development, such as increasing public transit access, optimizing smart infrastructure management, and establishing creative space usage for businesses. The first planned project will use sensors to gather real-time information at electric vehicle charging stations. This will enable garage managers to communicate EV spot availability to drivers ahead of time, while also tracking EV spot occupancy to better manage pricing and additional capital investments.
“In all of our work, we engage a broad set of industry, technology, civic, and community stakeholders to ensure that solutions are developed in a comprehensive, collaborative way to solve real world problems,” said Brenna Berman, CEO of City Tech. “Developing solutions through a robust partner ecosystem helps us deliver scalable, maintainable, and measurable impact on cities.”