Could data finally solve Singapore’s parking woes?

Parking space demand near housing areas are high for lorries, but these will become harder to get.

Many existing lots near housing estates will need to be redeveloped for new homes and community facilities; and residents have raised complaints on noise, fumes and safety from buses and trucks.

Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has called a tender to collect travel and parking data on heavy vehicles. It wants to study travel patterns of trucks and buses to better plan for heavy vehicle parking spaces.

The project will see GPS devices installed in trucks, lorries and buses for a month. It will track drivers’ parking patterns to identify and allocate parking spaces for such vehicles.

To address privacy concerns, URA has assured that it “will not receive information that identifies individual vehicle owners or drivers”.

Researchers and GPS suppliers will also be required to sign legal agreements to keep data confidential, and destroy the data after, it wrote in a statement.

The effort is part of a research study with the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).

By monitoring heavy vehicles, Singapore hopes to kill two birds with one stone: better parking allocations will lead to happier citizens. Image by Rym DeCoster, licensed under CC BY 2.0