Ask what stops cities building smarter mobility hubs and you'll get a tidy answer - the business case, or resident pushback, or internal silos. The real answer is messier: it's all of them, knotted together. Fix one and the next is waiting. And at the centre of the knot sit two things nobody enjoys discussing at a conference - who owns the data, and who pays for what.
Picture a new district going up next to a big venue. In a typical city, one department handles construction, another mobility, a third parking. Each has its own remit, its own budget, its own scorecard. To build something genuinely smart and space-efficient, all of them have to line up - and that's hard before a single invoice lands.
Because under the coordination problem sits a money one. One parking facility might serve event-goers, residents, and commuters, but its costs are smeared across departments that each see only their slice. Who pays for the venue, who pays for operations, who owns the thing? When a mobility hub is expensive to build, the returns rarely match any one department's budget - and the best business case in the world stalls if nobody can capture its value.
You don't dissolve silos with a PowerPoint slide. But you can make them a lot less obstructive by giving everyone the same trustworthy picture of what's happening. Which is where parking & mobility data comes in.
There's a logic cities are voicing more and more. As Willem van Heijningen, a strategist in the City of Amsterdam's Department of Mobility and Public Space, puts it: "We own the public space, including the parking space there. We also own the signage indicating where to go… To me, it is logical that we also own the parking data." He's right - and partners should back that instinct, not fight it.
The value isn't the data itself. It's the relationship it makes visible. Pull the sources together and you can finally see supply and demand side by side - how many people are arriving, of what kind, against how much parking space is free.
And visitors aren't interchangeable: some need an accessible bay, some come as a family, some arrive early, some just in time. Match those needs to real availability and everyone gets a better trip - and the area gets more livable. That's what data is for here. Not dashboards. Better matches.
This is where a partner has to be disciplined about its own role. The parking data should always stay with the customer - whether that's a private parking operator or the city. Our job isn't to hoard it. It's to help gather and analyse it in a standardised, secure way, then hand over the tools to make sense of it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A city like Amsterdam is already doing the hard part - pooling information from a dozen sources, making sense of it, adjusting policy on the back of it. The last thing it needs is a lock-in that turns its own data into someone else's asset. The right posture is the opposite: standardised, portable data, open interfaces, and analytics that lower the barrier to insight instead of raising it.
That's the thinking behind SKIDATA Connect - not another layer stacked on the mess, but one backbone underneath it, so on-street and off-street run as a single system and clean data flows into a city's existing transit and MaaS platforms.
Linköping is the clearest proof: 18-plus garages on SKIDATA Connect, on-street and off-street as one system, with full control over all its user data and no third-party platform sitting in the middle.
Florence runs the same play at scale - 15 sites and 6,000-plus spaces managed as one, ticketless end to end, €14.78 million in revenue in 2024.
And in Amsterdam, the same platform plugs into national parking rights through Servicehuis Parkeren - the data standardised, secure, and in the city's hands.
"Connected" is an overused word, so let's be concrete. In practice it means open interfaces, standardised data, and - just as much - partnering with people who share the same goal. A seamless journey can't come from one system alone; it takes several players cooperating around a common aim.
So the real next step isn't another platform. It's open dialogue, honest cooperation, and the nerve to pilot solutions in the mess of a real city. Break the silos by agreeing on standards and on who owns what. Keep the data with the customer. Pick partners who want the same outcome. Do that and the business case, the adoption, and the coordination all get easier - because they were never really separate problems.
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