I was supposed to fly to Chicago on Tuesday for an interview with Yona Shtern, CEO of newly branded Arrive (Formerly parkwhiz). Yona, whose home is in Montreal was flying in from Canada. Both of us found that the cold snap in the windy city was too much for reasonable travel so we retrenched and did the interview on Zoom (sort of an upmarket Skype that works.)
Yona believes that the parking industry has been rather defensive over the past decade. We have been cowering from possible attacks from autonomous vehicles, MaaS, the uber/lyft phenomena, and generally have a less than positive outlook on the future.
He told me that its time for the industry to play offense. Rather than hunker down and follow a business as usual plan, we must make sure we are part of the solution. The goal must be to embrace the technology that will make parking safer, faster, easier, and more reliable for drivers.
Whether we like it or not, the driver of today is most often ‘connected’ through their smart phone and we need to work with the automobile companies to move that connection to the car itself so the driver can have a seamless experience from the time they awake in the morning til they are home at night. Most things we experience today are “connected” whether it has to do with banking, shopping, entertainment, health care, and yes, driving.
Yona sees parking as being at the center of ‘mobility’ and its time we as an industry realized that.
To learn more of Yona’s ideas about the industry, read the March issue of Parking Today.
JVH
