Westminster pilots sensor technology to transform West End parking

24.10.2012
Westminster City Council is currently running a trial in the West End of London using sensor technology and data analytics that could transform parking congestion in busy areas.

Jo Lodge, head of BI and GIS at the Council, and Lewis Johnson, information analyst in the parking services division, spoke to Computerworld UK this week about how the pilot could lead to the Council changing its parking policies to help encourage different driver behaviour.

Westminster started using QlikView v11 in April of this year to tie together data from its underlying Microsoft infrastructure.

Lodge said: "People used to load data into a spreadsheet and then spend four days trying to manipulate it just to answer a few questions. We can now bring all the cashless information (data from mobile parking payments), which is millions of rows of information, and it will be there instantly."

"We then link that to the geographic information system as well, so you start to notice that one street is occupied 100% of the time, whilst one around the corner is occupied 30% of the time. People obviously don't know that there is parking close by."

Noticing this trend, using QlikView and the data from the cashless payments, Westminster decided to run a trial on Savile Row and Sackville St.