Parking Zürich AG operates six car parks in the Zurich area of Switzerland. Recently it equipped two of its facilities, ‘Hohe Promenade’ and ‘Hauptbahnhof’ (Central Station), with a Geutebruck virtualised video system. The installer, abaleo AG, integrated it with a Commend intercom system and a Scheidt and Bachmann parking system to produce a cutting edge automated parking management system.
The popular Hohe Promenade car park near the old town is a five-storey underground parking facility with 500-plus parking spaces. It has a pedestrian tunnel connection to Stadelhofen railway station and a 24-hour control centre by its main pedestrian entrance. The multi-storey ‘Hauptbahnhof’ car park is frequented round the clock by rail users as well as those dropping off or collecting passengers at the nearby long distance coach terminus.
A direct link between the two sites enables the video system to be run from both control centres, independently and in parallel, while giving each full access to each other’s systems whenever required. – Ideal for flexibility in deploying staff as well as perfect teamwork.
The full HD monitoring solution runs on five Geutebruck virtual servers on the Hohe Promenade site. The use of Geutebruck’s optimised compression process and fully compatible Geutebruck IP cameras ensure that all switching happens instantly and without delays or lost frames – for example when cameras make automatic quality changes in response to detected events. In the Hohe Promenade car park around 40 of its 100 cameras are paired up with emergency call points. Most recordings are event-controlled by the cameras’ motion sensors. This minimizes both the volume of streamed data and the human attention demanded. Image data is stored for different durations depending on the type of incident involved.
The Equallogic storage system holds image data from both car parks and gives very fast access to recorded footage. For Parking Zürich this system configuration is a stepping stone en route to eventually having two completely redundant systems.
The system assists in resolving a wide variety of typical parking issues. It immediately alerts staff to any barrier malfunction, provides unambiguous proof of misdemeanours, vandalism and fraud, and drastically reduces the time involved in incident investigation. A couple of examples:
If someone tries a parking fiddle which involves taking a car park ticket without actually driving into the car park, the system generates a so-called ‘ backout’ ticket, with associated alarm and relevant recordings. Any later claim that there was a pay station malfunction can be disproved using the ticket number to bring up relevant footage.
Fraudulent damage claims are countered by automatically documenting the condition of each vehicle as tickets are issued. The event dataset with relevant images and vehicle licence number makes it easy to check the veracity of any subsequent claim for damage.
Besides making customers feel safe, the new system sometimes even saves them money. – Using the vehicle registration number, staff can replace a lost ticket with an accurate duplicate so that the customer only pays what’s due and not a much higher full-daily rate.
Now that the Geutebruck system has proved its worth on two sites, Parking Zürich AG is hoping to introduce similar solutions at other facilities.
