TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT
It's 30 minutes to flight time. As the clock ticks, you - and everyone else in the airport garage - shift into Emergency Parking Prowl: ears perked for the sound of an engine starting, eyes peeled for walkers toting keys, hands clenched on the wheel.
At Baltimore-Washington International, you no longer have to rely on your senses alone. Lines of little red and green ceiling lights stretch along the rows of parked cars, and though they're reminiscent of the holidays, they're there year-round - part of the Smart Park Test Facility, the US's first automated parking system that lets drivers know in a hurry where the empty spaces are.
Switzerland-based Schick makes the Smart Park system, and it's installed in a few places around the world - from a giant underground mall in Barcelona to the garage at Samsung's HQ in Seoul. In Florida, Jacksonville's airport is buying the setup, which greets arriving motorists with electronic signs that convey how many spaces are available. A glance down a garage's central aisle shows bright LEDs - green arrows for vacancies and red Xs for no vacancies - over the entrance to each parking row. Sensors above each space determine whether a car is sitting there. (A motorcycle had better park right in the middle of a stall, or it could become Tahoe toast.) As soon as a cruising vehicle turns down a row with available spaces, the electronic sign displays the vacancies for that row as having been reduced by one.
The components are not outlandishly high tech. Ultrasonic sensors have been around for years, and their output travels through decoders and concentrators to a Windows 2000 PC, over plain-old telephone cable. No wireless, no Ethernet, just standard RS 422 and 232, which work fine hauling simple data over the long runs from garage to computer room (a mile in some systems).
BWI airport has spent $600,000 so far to get a thousand spaces working, with the remaining 3,600 slated to be wired for an additional $3 million. "It's worth the money," explains Neal Heaton, BWI's acting IT assistant. "Travelers don't like the aggravation of searching for spaces. If we can avoid that, we win, and that's when we make the money."
MUST READ
Newt's A-List
Sunjammer Sets Sail
Rival Schools Charge Into Orbit
Whiteboard Jungle
The Next Next Thing
See Spot, Drive!
People
Jargon Watch
SkyDoc at 30,000 Feet
Playing God With the Handheld Market
No More Fashion Victims
The Economics of Adoption
Wired Index
Raw Data
