Technologies company Fima is going to cooperate with the global leader in parking solutions – the Swiss company Schick Electronic. This partnership will enable Fima to implement “green” parking guidance systems that will help reducing environmental pollution by efficiently directing car drivers to available parking spaces.

“Schick Electronic has designed and patented a unique parking lot system that counts the available parking spaces and directs drivers directly to them. It both offers an additional degree of comfort for car drivers on parking lots and makes parking 20 per cent faster, thus cutting down the amount of automobile emissions,” Fima’s Development Director Vytautas Zinkevičius said.

State-of-the-art parking lot solutions are usually installed in lots that can accommodate 300 cars and up. “Vilnius has several dozen lots roomy enough for 300 and more cars. Besides, there is unending construction of new buildings in progress, and such buildings have several levels of underground parking facilities. Therefore, the market has a huge potential,” Zinkevičius was convinced.

Modern parking solutions are being installed at parking lots of various facilities around the globe – from airports to shopping centres to hospitals to banks, etc.

Schick Electronic’s system consists of a multitude of sensors, green and red lamps installed above each space to indicate whether it is free, or taken, display boards and smart software to analyse traffic flows.

“Although there has been precedent in Lithuania of such a system being in place (the Kaunas Akropolis), the Swiss parking system is more reliable and accurate, just as their watches. These criteria are key as they build confidence in drivers, who follow the system’s instructions where to go,” Zinkevičius said.

Experts say that in underground parking facilities parking systems ought to be connected to ventilation and exhaust elimination systems. This also helps save energy – cars can be disallowed to enter the lower levels until the upper ones are full, shutting down ventilation and lighting on the empty levels in the meantime.

The new partners of Fima guarantee that the modern parking guidance system can boost the number of parking spaces by 19.2 per cent thanks to the reduced need for space necessary to make U-turns.

“Schick Electronic is probably the only company that conforms to the IP54 requirements for protection of hardware against dust and splashing water, which requirements are applicable to all the hardware installed in underground parking facilities around Europe,” Fima’s development director said.

He explained that after a Schick Electronic system was installed at the 15,000-or-so-spaces parking lot of the Baltimore airport in 2000, only 8 sensors had to be replaces in the span of eight years. For systems from other manufacturers, up to 3 per cent of sensors must be replaced per year. Consequently, the amount of sensors in need of replacement since 2000 would have been 330 times higher.