Hello,

we are a team of product design engineering students at the Glasgow School of Art/University of Glasgow and are currently working on a project about daily journeys for the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

For this project, we decided to develop something that stops people without a blue badge from using disabled parking spots. To do this, we came up with a concept for which we would really appreciate any sort of feedback from you.

General Information:

  • Our Concept uses the new regular blue badge being issued since 1 January 2012 but has an additional tag attached to it.
  • The new regular blue badge already has a unique code that is registered on a national database. Traffic wardens can access the national database for verification checks in order to tackle fraud.
  • The changes applied to disabled parking space: a parking post is placed at each disabled spot.

Procedure: Parking at a Disabled Parking Spot using our Concept

  1. Find a disabled parking spot as you normally would.

  2. Get the car into parking position. Proximity sensor automatically detects whether there is a car situated in the parking spot.

  3. Now two possibilities:

    you have a blue badge with a tag attached to it: the parking post detects the signal sent from the tag and recognises that you are entitled to park here. It then gives you positive feedback that your badge was recognised. You can now leave the car and do everything like you normally would.

    you don’t have a blue badge: the parking post detects that you are not entitled to park and a light goes off making the parking offender feel embarrassed and ashamed.

  4. Once you want to leave again, you simply drive away. The parking post automatically detects that you left and the next person is able to use the parking spot.

We would really appreciate every comment. Negative or positive. Any other ideas or comments are more than welcome as well. Thank you very much!"