DRC Member Spotlight: Spot Parking

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Mark Frumar, U.S. General Manager at Spot Parking, tells us about the importance of promoting digital parking assets and transportation solutions to support a more seamless experience for drivers, commuters, and operations teams.

How does your company help other businesses become more effective?

Spot Parking digitizes curb sides, parking garages, lots, and campuses for drivers to better understand their parking options via a user-friendly digital map on their phone or desktop (with no app download required).

Through machine learning, digitization, and enhanced visual parking communication, Spot’s technology elevates the driver experience by guiding drivers directly to the best available parking space based on their unique criteria –the destination, parking permit type, EV charging point, loading zone, ADA requirements and more.

Spot Parking helps to automate operations for administrators by providing valuable data insights into parking as an asset – answering who is parking, when, and where?  This data is the key foundation that promotes informed decisions about parking, mobility, and transportation for the future.  Spot’s technology also reduces the time it takes for drivers to find a suitable parking space, helps interpret confusing parking rules, lowers emissions, and minimizes time spent circling for an open space.

What differentiates your company from others in your industry?

Spot Parking has pioneered a technology for the rapid and accurate collection and visualization of both on-street and off-street parking rules, displayed in a familiar Google Maps format to the user directly to their cell phone. Once the visual platform of parking is established, it forms a centralized view of parking and transportation in partnership with existing IoT technology such as occupancy counters, license plate recognition technology, payment systems, and more.

Spot Parking also stands out from other providers by the important fact that we allow customers to retain ownership of their own parking data. This is an important factor for many clients, both existing and new.

We also facilitate an Open-Data approach by providing access to stakeholders via our API, encouraging further innovation.

What do you enjoy most about doing business in the Dallas Region?

We are originally an Australian-founded company, and we absolutely love the welcoming, collaborative, ‘roll-up-your-sleeve’ mentality in the Dallas Region.  All of the folks we talk to are more than happy to share their time and talk about this growing, innovative, business-minded region.

We are fairly new to the DRC and the Dallas Region, and look forward to getting to know all the different suburbs and neighborhoods.  I will be at the Parking Industry Expo (PIE) conference in July, and it would be great to meet in person after such a strange year! Please reach out for a chat to mark@spotparking.us.

Why did you decide to become a DRC member?

We were looking to joining an organization that is welcoming, open, innovative, collaborative, and supportive of new businesses – both at a state level and international level.  The DRC ticked all the boxes for us.

Another key factor is our technology is designed for University campuses and Smart Cities.  With some of the country’s largest and growing Universities located in Texas, it was clear that joining the DRC was an important step for our company.

How has your business changed in the past five years?

Spot has been through some exciting changes in the past five years. Starting off life as a pay-by-phone parking app for on-street, we quickly found that cities did not have the level of data we wanted in order to provide a seamless customer experience when parking. Who wants to walk to a meter first to get a number to use their mobile app to pay? We set about solving that data problem.

Two years later, we were able to digitize the entire curbside, proving out our technology in both Australia and the U.S. It was then that universities approached us with their parking problems, seeing Spot as an innovative solution. Operating like small (in some cases, medium-sized) cities, universities often have highly complex permit systems and a diverse range of stakeholders. We partnered with CampusParc at Ohio State University and created Spot Campus.

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