Honk does #CPABanff2017

Members of our Sales Squad flew to beautiful, serene Banff a couple of weeks ago to attend and exhibit at this year’s CPA Conference at The Fairmont Banff Springs. You really can’t beat a setting like Banff – definitely one of the most picturesque and stunning places in oh-Canada! What better place to talk all things parking?

It came as no surprise that the overarching main theme of the conference was the future of parking. Specifically: data, autonomous vehicles and smart cities.

Data

Data has been parking’s ‘trendy’ best friend for a few years now. You can’t go a week without hearing something about ‘big data’ popping up in the parking news. (Well actually, this transcends to so many other industries.) Now more than ever, people are really honing in on using all this data to make smart decisions, and help push forward new policies around parking. **Shameless plug: Honk integrated with Smarking’s technology to give EasyPark a holistic view of their parking operations in Vancouver! Smarking gave a session on ‘Using Data to Inform Parking Policy Decisions’ at CPA.

Smart Cities

Closely intertwined with big data – first comes data, and then comes smart cities. At the highest level, smart cities use different types and sources of data to funnel back to manage assets and resources in the most efficient way possible. Quite the mouthful, coles notes: use data to make a city operate as efficiently as possible. Smart parking is one of the many different data collection points – and a crucial one! (Not biased, it’s a fact).

Autonomous Vehicles

And thirdly, we have autonomous vehicles. Which is really at the future of smart cities. We’ve all heard news stories on how Uber and the likes are working tirelessly to create autonomous vehicles. Where does this fit with smart cities and parking? Will likely find out sooner than later!

Pictured: Kacey rep’ing our Honk booth on the conference tradeshow floor.