Wow, Canberra Centre goes High Tech Parking

Well, Canberra isn’t exactly a huge city, and because of that, well that and the fact that it’s populated by politicians who go home on the weekends, it tends to lag behind in tech and modern conveniences. 

Today when I met Jeffa36 at the Canberra Centre (Canberra’s down town Mall) I was amazed at the high tech parking.  Have a look at the picture below:

That sign is telling the driver that there are 7 empty spaces in that row and 185 spaces straight ahead.

How does it know you might ask, take a look at this pic:

On the left you see the green lights? Those lights indicate an empty space, while the two red ones more in the foreground indicate there is a car in the space.  Along the right, the lights are blue, those indicate an empty handicap space.

Each space has a proximity sensor in it that picks up a car in the spot, it then changes the light, and updates the number of empty spaces in the row.

This is a fantastic system. No more car park tours, no more stalking people as they return to their car, you can look across the car park and see exactly where the empty spaces are.

Kudos to the Canberra Centre, this is very cool!!

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2010
  All those red and green lights going up just before Christmas, my first thought was it was some kind of fancy decoration. Those sensors are really interesting. I was jumping up and down at one trying to set it off but no luck. And with my bulk I would have thought I'd have registered as a small car at least.