How much time a year do you waste looking for a parking space? This is not an easy calculation, which, however, you can avoid at three locations in Banja Luka.

Thanks to smart technologies, you no longer have to circle around the parking lot near the Hotel Palas, the Museum of Modern Art and Vladike Platona street. Just take a look at the display at the entrance which will tell you if there are free spaces in the parking lot or check it on your mobile phone.

Smart parking is only a part of the Smart city solution with which, among other things, we are working on IT modernization of traffic, says Goran Starčević, head of the Automation Department at Prointer ITSS, a member of Infinity International Group, which is responsible for this project. With smart city smart technologies and an innovative mobile app, parking lots are safer and more efficient, and traffic jams less. In addition, Banja Luka is the only one in Bosnia and Herzegovina that can boast of that.

"The system consists of cameras and controllers that collect data, ie images from cameras. Each camera is configured to monitor a specific area and has its own virtual loops with which to see each parking space. The camera sends the image to the controller who processes it and records whether a certain place is free or occupied, and then that information is sent to the display located at the entrance to the parking lot. If it is full, the vehicle does not enter the parking lot and no crowds are created, "explains Starčević.

An additional relief for drivers is the mobile application "Parking Detection Banja Luka", which they can download on the Google Play store and see which parking space is closest to them, which saves time and avoids traffic jams.

"The advantage of such a system is especially visible in the parking lot near the Museum of Contemporary Art, where you have a time limit of two hours, which means that someone has to constantly visit it and record how much space is taken outside the prescribed deadline. it immediately indicates which vehicle exceeded two hours and sends the data to the competent city department ", says Starčević.

Smart solutions make everyday life and obligations easier for the citizens, and optimize the work of the local community and reduce costs, notes Drago Gverić from the Innovation Center in Banja Luka. It is a kind of direct communication that makes the city more functional.

"These are software solutions that are available to citizens, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. One of them is smart parking lots that work through two basic modalities - a system that suggests whether there are free spaces in the parking lot and a slightly more advanced version using which you follow through the application where you could park. It is a great relief for both drivers and the city ", says Gverić.

He notes that within the Banja Luka future city project, the City, the Ministry of Scientific and Technological Development, Higher Education and Information Society and UNDP have implemented a dozen smart city solutions that have proven to be extremely useful.

One of them was operated by the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Srpska, and it is an LED display that warns drivers not to use phones and fasten their seat belts. resources and removal of municipal waste is placed on a number of containers in Lazarevo - it suggests that removal should take place when the containers are full, and not just schematically and in the prescribed order, "explains Gverić.

Smart city solutions, ie smart parking lots, are planned at several other locations in the city, experts from Prointer note, thanks to whom, a year ago, Banja Luka received a smart traffic light, the first of its kind in the region.