KUCHING: Visitors to the The Spring Shopping Mall here will no longer have to roll down their car windows as it will adopt smart parking system developed by the Digital Economy Hub (DEH) beginning Monday (April 26).
DEH chief executive officer Eddie Wee said the new contactless car park solutions would enable a vehicle to pass through the entry point of the parking area in less than four seconds compared to the traditional ticket parking system which could take up to 15 seconds per vehicle.
“For the traditional ticket parking system, the driver need to roll down the window, push the button and wait for the ticket to be processed and issued before they can enter the parking area. Over time, this could create traffic congestion.
“Our smart car park solutions would speed up the process whereby the automatic barricade will open once it detects the car plate number and allow them to pass through,” he said.
He said this in an exclusive interview with New Sarawak Tribune and sister paper Suara Sarawak at DEH premises in One Jaya The Lifestyle Mall here.
He explained that the payment for the parking would be done online through Pay & Go application.
“All you need to do is just key-in your plate number and confirm the payment for the online transaction.
“After that, you can just exit the premises without having to stop by the parking payment kiosk or having the risk of forgetting or losing the parking ticket,” he added.
He also said those who do not have the Pay & Go app in their mobile phones can also make the payment at a special kiosk where they could do the online transaction using SarawakPay.
Apart from The Spring, the smart car park solutions has also been implemented in several other places namely Plaza Merdeka shopping mall, CityOne Megamall, Wisma Bukit Mata, Sarawak Plaza and Metrocity Matang.
“By end of this year, I believe we will be able to reach about 15 car parks,” he said.
Wee mentioned that for the last 10 months, there has been more than 800,000 transactions using the smart system.
“Within one year from now, we are targetting to be able to process about three to four million transactions in Kuching alone,” he pointed out.
Wee added that the Hub was focusing on promoting the all intellectual property (IP) of smart car park solutions to the whole Asian market rather than confining to Kuching city alone.
He and his team will continue to conduct research and development (R&D) on the system in order to be the top smart car park solutions provider in the Asian region.
