Seberang Perai Mayor wants smart parking app

Seberang Perai city in Malaysia is planning an app for drivers to pay for parking, Mayor Dato’ Maimunah Mohd Sharif told GovInsider The app will let drivers pay for their parking slot using a credit card.

When the allotted time is about to expire, it will notify the driver to top-up their parking credits. The app will help the government increase its revenue from parking fees, Sharif said. Currently, drivers buy coupons to pay for their parking slot, but the city government has been losing revenue from drivers who park without purchasing coupons.

“More often than not, we are not optimising our revenue. We would like to increase our revenue,” she said. In the future, she wants to see the app become a smart parking system, where using data and sensors it can navigate drivers to the nearest available parking slot.

“We would like to use IoT to make it very user-friendly,” she said. Seberang Perai will work with the Multimedia Development Corporation to develop the smart parking app.

This will be the city’s first project using IoT, and next Sharif wants to use IoT to monitor construction projects in real-time. The city’s cleanliness is a priority for the Mayor, and monitoring the projects in real-time could help her ensure that companies follow the city’s environmental policies.

For instance, the government is planning a new low-carbon township in the city’s Batu Kawan area, and all private sector developers will have to follow government guidelines to keep the pollution low.

The city already has a system to monitor the work of real-estate developers in Seberang Perai, but wants more accurate data.

“We work together with the resident engineer of the developer. Every time there is progress on the ground, the engineer will upload [an update] to our system,” Sharif said. An engineer from the government then goes to the construction site to check the data.