NANJING: The city of Nanjing, capital of east China’s Jiangsu Province, has started upgrading its parking lots by the use of electronic toll collection (ETC) devices to improve parking efficiency.
According to the Nanjing Urban Construction Investment Holding Group, it has collaborated with Jiangsu Tongxingbao Intelligent Transportation Technology Co., Ltd, an ETC specialized company, to develop Nanjing into a demonstration city in smart parking.
The newly-renovated parking lot of Nanjing Railway Station, the city’s first smart parking lot equipped with ETC devices, opened to the public on Sunday, where ETC users do not need to pay in cash or by scanning QR codes, reducing congestion at entrances.
ETC is normally deployed at highway entrances to replace toll stations as it boosts transport efficiency with nonstop tolling.
Nanjing has more than 6,000 parking lots and at least 2,000 are scheduled to be upgraded into smart ones with ETC by the end of 2020, said Chang Hongchen, deputy chief engineer of the Nanjing Urban Construction Investment Holding Group.
The company said it plans to cooperate with leading research and development institutions, network operators and internet companies to build Nanjing into a smart city in the future. China’s ETC users have so far exceeded 200 million. The country issued a circular earlier in 2019 to popularize the use of freeway ETC devices to reduce emissions and logistics costs and relieve traffic congestion. – Agencies
