AppyParking Q&A — Jack Taylor, Head of Operations

In the latest of our innovator interview series, we’ve turned to automotive. This is a sector that feels like it’s on the verge of a period of major innovation with autonomous vehicles and connected, smarter cities on the near horizon.

Fresh off a funding round that’s secured an additional £2.25 million to develop a driverless parking system, we’ve heard from Jack Taylor from AppyParking. Having launched simply as a service that helps you find parking information and available spaces, the team are now focusing on developing AppyParking into a comprehensive platform, fit for the wave of innovation facing this sector.

As simply as possible, can you summarise what AppyParking offers?

AppyParking is way more than just another parking app. We’re building a connected car and intelligent transport platform that bridges the gap between big data, high definition mapping, IoT and payments.

When was AppyParking founded?

July 2013

And how many people have used AppyParking?

We’ve had hundreds of thousands of downloads since going live in both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

What problem do you solve?

Right now there’s significant fragmentation across public and private sector parking. Traffic departments block any chance of truly intelligent transport solutions and the latent potential that lies in Smart Cities and multi-model transport. The use of legacy and siloed systems prevents meaningful data reaching people and allowing them to choose the most efficient, economical and environmentally-friendly modes of transport.

Studies have shown that 30% of city congestion is from vehicles looking for parking. Similarly, in the UK last year drivers were fined over £750m in parking fines and over 40,000 deaths each year in the UK are attributed to poor air quality from vehicle emissions.

What are the biggest benefits of using AppyParking over other potential options?

Other parking apps display less detailed tariff information, which is also less accurately represented. For example, Westminster has the concept of a minimum charge increment. This means that the charges are prorated. If I park for 15 minutes, I get charged for 15 minutes. Our competitors do not show you what the price would be for 15 minutes, it will just give you a flat rate of 4.80/hour. AppyParking will work out the prorated cost using our Tariff Engine, so you know what the exact cost is.

We’re currently working with Westminster on 2 payment products, both making use of the Tariff Engine, which will allow users to make payments for parking directly in our app. This is due to expand to two other Local Authorities in the very near future.

Real-time availability — we display (where sensors are present) real-time availability within our app, showing you if a space is available at the exact moment you’re looking. This is currently presented in Westminster, parts of Islington, Coventry and parts of Reading and will continue to be expanded into the other cities we cover within the UK.

What are the biggest roadblocks or obstacles for you?

Our goal is to create the next generation, intelligent transport system (ITS). This requires dealing with the slow-moving public sector and vehicle OEM’s

Where did the driving idea behind the business come from?

The idea for AppyParking came from Dan Hubert, a former advertising creative. In 2012, after having trouble parking when going to a gig at the Royal Albert Hall, he asked a traffic warden about the rules for the single yellow lines. Having heard that the rules for this area were to be found a few roads away from the area he was actually enquiring about, Dan saw an opportunity.

While still working full-time, Hubert started to contact every London borough and digitise their Controlled Parking Zones from basic PDF maps. Originally named Yellow Line Parking and dealing only with single yellow line parking restrictions, the company was expanded and rebranded as AppyParking in 2014.

Where do you see AppyParking in 5 years time?

We have an ambition at AppyParking to make parking a truly forgettable experience. We want parking to be something that even in major cities is never something you have to worry about or that takes a significant amount of time.

We want to be the go-to provider for autonomous parking and traffic management solutions across the world. I believe that the better we do our job, the more our technology and solutions will become part of the fabric of smart cities. So in five years AppyParking will be making cities less congested and polluted and its population more productive, without anyone even knowing we’re there.

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