Ville de Puteaux is an extended municipality located in the western outskirts of Paris, in the heart of the Ile-de-France department around the capital city. It has a long industrial past, in particular in the car industry and aeronautics, and its northern part currently hosts a large portion of La Défense, Paris business district.
An endless skyline of office buildings, business parks, restaurants, and retail stores attract a steadily high volume of daily visitors, employees and residents during the weekdays. Puteaux is also served by tramways and high-speed motorways, as well as suburban rail lines and underground.
Embracing the philosophy of smart mobility for smart cities, Puteaux searched a flexible and fully monitorable alternative for their ageing parking equipment installed at seven different areas, ranging from the principal market, the theatre, the Pierre et Marie Curie Médiathèque or the Lully Conservatory to the the areas of Godefroy and Offenbach.
Each day thousands of drivers (both occasional users and contract users) cruise Puteaux streets trying to find open spots, thus creating congestion in the busiest commercial and mixed-use areas of the Commune. The annual counter monitored through JMS totaled more than 24,000 sub-scribers and 54,000 occasional users.
When determining the optimal parking management for each of the seven existing lots across the city, the municipality faced a challenge of out of date technology, obsolescing equipment and insufficient service, which clashed with the increasing demand for baseline level of parking availability and flexible management. The Commune of Puteaux wished to improve parking access, by showing the available spaces, making it easier for drivers to reach them and for parking staff to monitor and real-time manage all the areas, ensuring highly re-sponsive customer service.
Puteaux weighed multiple factors, among which the immediate access to parking performance data, counter check and relevant complex reporting, and turned to HUB in order to implement one of the country most progressive parking programs, that will serve as a model for other French cities to follow.
A critical objective of the systems’ upgrade was to deliver an immediately available and dynamic tool dedicated to data reporting and analysis of the parking lots performances.
HUB automated 7 parking areas with over 50 devices including entry stations, exit stations and pay-on-foot or pay-in-lane pay stations. To ensure the smoothest installation, HUB partnered with Horus Park, the division of Groupe Horus dedicated to professional parking solutions: their field-proven expertise and technology capabilities proved fundamental in meeting the project deadlines. All of the 7 sites are now mixed use, serve both transient parkers and contract/subscribers, and comprise of over 2,300 bays.
From the earliest stage of specification of the project, to the testing and onsite fine-tuning of the installation, HUB demonstrated an expert and flexible management of the technical requirements, up to the flawless integration with the city app Puteaux Mobile. The app makes it possible for drivers to check the occupancy of the parking areas before their trip starts, and get directions to the closest available space. HUB has successfully integrated the occupancy data through JMS External Services, which swiftly interfaces with the parking infrastructure.
Among the forthcoming developments planned by HUB France with the support of Horus Park, 15 LPR cameras to facilitate the capture of license plate data and audit purposes and multiple guidance systems. In parallel with cutting-edge digital services, HUB equipment allowed a high degree of flexibility and customization on the hardware, going so far as to embody the municipality branding by including the logo within the full-color graphic interfaces.
The system will enable the Commune to include multiple additional functionalities in the future. HUB is excited to build on the successful collaboration with Puteaux, to sustain the progression into a smart city.
“We have long time ago started to reflect how parking relates to the urban development of Puteaux, its density and transit accessibility. City life is extremely hectic, and we wished to deliver an effortless access to parking to the thousands who drive around Puteaux daily. Making it easier to get to work, shop, and commute, also increases the overall economic activity and competitiveness of the city businesses. At the same time, making the operations more efficient, more responsive in terms of service and actually traceable – that was the main reason to choose the JMS solution. That is true peace of mind, and a smart way of approaching mobility in our metropolitan area,” Management Team, Ville de Puteaux.