Smart Roads and Parking

The past few years, innovation and technology have reached new heights, much beyond laptops, iPads or smart phones. Innovation and technology is progressing with each passing day. The concepts of smart cities, smart homes, and smart vehicles, are being implemented all over in developed countries. Objects here can get connected to the internet, collect data, and channelize it in order to ease our day-to-day life. The current genre of vehicles is equipped with various kinds of sensors, CPUs, and a software system that has communication capabilities. The increase in population has resulted in more vehicles, congested streets, limited parking spaces, and compromised road safety. Research and industry have proposed many technological advancements, and incorporated a few, in vehicles, but improvements for roads have largely gone unexplored. Smart roads, or Smart highways, are the terms used to define roads having IoT-enabled technologies like smart sensors, wireless connectivity, big data, and cloud computing. They use Solar technology to minimize electricity consumption, making the technology energy efficient. Researchers claim that, in the near future, smart vehicles will not be functional without proper smart roads and smart parking systems. Smart roads and parking contribute to making the drive safe, green, and convenient. They provide real-time information to drivers regarding traffic congestion, weather conditions, natural emergencies, e.g. landslide on the mountains, ice on the roads on high terrain, etc. Smart parking systems help drivers with information regarding available parking spaces as well as warnings about incoming traffic. Smart roads are also conceptualised to be equipped with wireless electric-charging systems and electric-charging stations. Electrical energy generated by the vehicles can be used to light streetlights to provide safe navigation to drivers at night. In this chapter, the concept of Smart Roads and Smart Parking systems is elaborated in a comprehensive manner. Various technologies are highlighted which reduce traffic, limit electricity use, significantly increase safety on the roads, and design a way to use parking spaces more effectively without the need to build new roads/parking spaces. The chapter elaborates various technologies that will lay a strong foundation for smart roads such as transforming legacy roads to smart roads, solar road highways, etc. The chapter also elaborates on transforming traditional parking systems into smart parking systems.