Acer unit bringing smart transport solutions to Philippines

TAIPEI CITY, Taiwan — How many minutes in a day do you waste finding a parking spot? The international average for crowded cities like Metro Manila is 20 minutes, but this may be significantly reduced if Acer ITS Inc., the spin off company of tech giant Acer Corp., succeeds in introducing its smart transportation solutions in the Philippines. 

The company plans to roll out its fully-integrated smart parking solutions in Metro Manila and other areas with tourism traffic and is looking for a local partner that can aggregate data for parking spaces in the country. 

“We are going to try out Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, and Singapore. These countries are our next targets but first, we need a parking information provider for this kind of solution to become successful in these countries,” Joe Wang, senior technical director of Acer ITS Advanced Technical Department told journalists during the Taiwan Excellence Smart City Brands Media Tour hosted by the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA). 

Wang said Acer ITS sees plenty of opportunities in improving the parking situation in airports and various tourism areas in the Philippines, but acknowledged that compared with Taiwan, it would be significantly more difficult to roll out its smart transportation services in the country because there currently is no centralized database for privately-owned parking spaces and roadside parking spaces in local government units. 

“Some of the airports (in the Philippines) are going to renew their system for parking lots as they are not convenient for tourists. They want to make it more automated and that will be one of the opportunities. According to our regional office, they are trying to contact various parking lot operators in Metro Manila because they have to push for the acceptance of our solutions. The coverage is not just Manila, but other vacation islands as well,” said Wang. 

Another area Acer ITS is interested in is the use of its parking solutions on street parking. In Taiwan, it has so far installed 100 automated street parking meters in various cities as part of the pilot and will increase this to 2,000 within the year. These require very limited intervention from traffic enforcers. 

Wang said before the automation of the metering system for street parking, enforcement of regulations were loose, resulting in weak revenues and occasional abuse of space. With the installation of fully automated street parking meters, city governments saw a 50 percent increase in revenues from parking operations. 

The Acer ITS smart parking system provides for either a fully-automated or semi-automated parking system depending on the needs of the client. The goal of the system is to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes drivers to secure parking space and pay the parking fee, convert cash-based to cashless payment systems, lessen or remove the need for ticketing labor, and increase revenues from parking operations. 

These interventions are applied in the development of both fully-integrated off-street and on-street parking systems.  

Through the PKLot app, drivers can find the parking lots nearest to them and check the availability of slots. Parking lots, in turn, are developed to have an integrated e-ticketing system, license plate recognition, image recognition, and is supported by cloud service. Drivers may even link their credit cards to the app to facilitate faster payment. 

Data collected from the system can also be used to analyze business conditions so operations can be constantly improved. For roadside parking operated by local government units, this means having a more rigid and systematic enforcement of parking rules in public areas and raking in more revenues for the improvement of urban services. 

Acer ITS’ parent company Acer has a strong presence in the country through the distribution of laptop and desktop computers, a reputation Wang hopes will be carried over in the rollout of its smart transportation services.