A lot has happened since Fybr started providing smart parking solutions in the early 1990s. At the time, the initiative was futuristic. But now, smart parking has become commonplace, with a number of solution providers.
“We ran the world’s largest smart parking implementation,” said Dr. Rik Goodwin, an organizational psychologist specializing in corporate and consumer behavior and Fybr COO. There were about 9,000 spaces in San Francisco. At the time, SFpark’s expectation of smart parking was to enable wayfinding and tracking space utilization.
The value proposition for smart cities is much more. For example, let’s say a person visits a neighborhood often and frequents a certain hat store. With Fybr’s tools, the store-owner could expect the customer and reserve a space close to the store. Since the owner knows the customer is likely to buy $200 worth of hats, he could pay for her 30-minute parking, and even extend her parking stay if necessary to avoid ticketing. In this case everyone wins – the city, the store, and the customer.
Goodwin is clear on Fybr’s strategic goal: to sit directly in the middle of smart city development. “We are creating a platform with edge devices and communications features to enable any data package on low data-rate networks for a large enterprise or smart cities system. So, instead of having unrelated, costly silos of excellence managing different aspects of the smart city – smart parking, water management, smart lighting – we allow cities to control all of them through one service.”
