Analysis of use of shared data for smart parking services in Sweden

The use of open and shared data in smart cities and public organizations have gained a lot of attention the last years. In Sweden, there are a number of projects looking into the use of open and shared data in the public sector. One application area of shared data is municipality driven information services on areas or streets with available parking spots. The input for this type of services are ticket machines, parking houses and spaces, and smart phone applications. Besides different types of data and formats, the input data is usually provided by a multitude of different type of actors. Looking back, we can see that mobile phone based solutions for parking services have been used for a decade. These solutions were originally a complement to ticket machines where you did pay with cash or credit cards. Today not only the payment is digital but also the ticket handling is fully digital, the paper ticket is replaced by data records in data bases and receipts are send by be-mails or SMS. This development with digital tickets and parking sessions have enabled an emerging type of information services where car drivers can get information on the availability of free parking spaces in specific zones or streets. However, in Sweden it turns out that these parking information services do not take off on a large scale based on a common framework and exchange of shared data. There are some examples where the municipality manages to provide a reasonably good overall picture, but currently most of these information services provide an "incomplete" map and there is no established way of cooperation between actors in the parking industry. In this paper, we present a set of mechanisms, drivers and problems to share parking information among actors. The main research contribution is to identify patterns of cooperation among different actors and to identify main obstacles for sharing data. The analysis is based on interviews with different types of actors; mobile public and private parking operators and providers of mobile parking apps.