The City of Edinburgh wants to reduce the number of heavy and high-emission vehicles in its historic city centre. In the EIT Urban Mobility RAPTOR programme, Dutch data analysis specialist Monit Data proposed meeting this challenge with data-driven car park management – and its proposal received high scores.
Parking policy is often shaped by public or political pressure, experience and perceptions. Data provides an objective picture and shows how policy changes take effect – but with a scattered landscape of parking systems and data formats, collecting it is a challenge of its own. “For over 15 years we have been transforming raw unorganised data into clear actionable insights using our unique Parking Monitor platform,” says Monit Data.
What is RAPTOR?
The Rapid Applications for Transport (RAPTOR) programme matches urban mobility challenges in European cities with start-ups and SMEs, so that solutions can be fast-tracked and tested in real life. It is managed by EIT Urban Mobility, an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union, and Europe’s largest innovation community for urban mobility.
Three modules for Edinburgh
Monit’s cloud-based Parking Monitor is used in more than 40 cities and processes over 100 million parking transactions a year. For Edinburgh, which needed to know how many heavy vehicles actually park in the city and how pricing could steer them, Monit proposed three modules:
- Parking occupancy: on- and off-street occupancy by street, neighbourhood or car park and by time interval, sourced automatically from parking and barrier systems of all major suppliers – and increasingly from enforcement scan-cars.
- Vehicle classification: a module in pilot phase that classifies vehicles by number plate data. For Edinburgh, weight, size and emissions data from the UK’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) defines “heavy” vehicles; in the Netherlands, Monit uses data from the RDW.
- Pricing scenarios: simulation of different tariff structures and their effect on occupancy and revenue.
“We are excited to see that parking data is seen as ever more important for creating better urban environments, both in the RAPTOR programme and in European initiatives such as Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP),” says Monit Data. The Dutch parking sector’s early move towards a centralised data infrastructure gives the company experience it now wants to share with operators across Europe.
Photo: Edinburgh Old Town – K. Mitch Hodge / Unsplash
This article first appeared in Parking Trend International, issue 3-2026, the magazine of the European Parking Association. Read the full issue online.