Parking Zürich AG in Zurich, the Swiss banking centre, recently equipped two of its facilities with a virtualised-video system which the installer, abaleo AG, integrated with a Commend intercom and a Scheidt and Bachmann parking system.
Parking Zürich AG operates six car parks in the Zurich area. Two of them, ‘Hohe Promenade’ and ‘Hauptbahnhof’ (Central Station), with the new Geutebruck video security system includes a direct link between the two sites so that their control centres can run independently and in parallel, while also having full access to each other’s systems when necessary. This gives the company greater flexibility in deploying staff as well as enabling teamwork when situations demand it.
The Hohe Promenade car park is a five-storey underground park dating from the 1960s but renovated in 2010-11. Only a couple of minutes from the ‘Kunsthaus’, the theatre and the opera house, it is close to the old town. Its main pedestrian entrance and gatehouse control centre are on Rämi Street to the north, but it also has a pedestrian tunnel connecting it to Stadelhofen railway station to the west. Its 500-plus parking spaces include 100 super-size ones with generous access room for vehicles and passengers alike, as well as ten spaces with electric charging points.
Being just north of the city’s main railway station, the company’s multi-storey ‘Hauptbahnhof’ car park is for rail users as well as those dropping off or collecting passengers at the long distance coach terminus. It is used at all hours and its security provision reflects that.
To ensure customers feel safe at all times Parking Zürich has opted for a full HD monitoring. The image quality ensures that every detail of the scene is captured and can be viewed in the control centres, while the use of Geutebruck’s optimised compression process and its fully compatible IP cameras ensures that switching happens without delays or lost frames – for example when cameras make automatic quality changes in response to detected events.
The new CCTV in the Hohe Promenade car park has around 100 Geutebruck IP cameras and runs on five Geutebruck virtual servers. About 40 of the cameras are paired up with emergency call points to ensure that whenever an emergency button is pressed the guard hears and sees both the caller and his immediate surroundings. The 24-hour control centre by the Rämi Street entrance houses the high availability Equallogic storage system which holds image data from both car parks and gives access to recorded footage. It retains image data for different durations depending on the type of event involved.
Footage of pay stations is archived for several weeks; service requests from the intercoms are automatically deleted after a few days; recordings of incidents which may give rise to legal proceedings are automatically backed up onto an external data store. Even while these processes are under way, all the system’s video material is simultaneously available for viewing in the other control room at the Hauptbahnhof car park. For Parking Zürich this arrangement is a stepping stone en route to eventually having two completely redundant systems.
Most recordings in the car parks are event-controlled by motion sensors in the cameras. This minimises the volume of data being streamed in the network and ensures that human attention is only demanded when really necessary.
Images are displayed using Geutebruck’s GSC View management software which allows easy, intuitive use. It offers a range of settings enabling image optimization for each site and each user and it can also support remote access to images via cell phone. The range of day to day situations staff have to deal with include some which are relatively simple and self-explanatory, and some which are more complex and less transparent. The video system brings clarity in various ways. For example, the narrative behind a broken barrier may be quite easy to deduce, but what’s just as critical for the business is that it is spotted and rectified quickly to prevent losses mounting through customers being able to leave the premises without paying. This is where video with event controlled image switching now ensures staff are alerted, delays are avoided, and intervention is possible.
Cameras which provide unambiguous proof of misdemeanours, vandalism or fraud provide even greater financial benefits because their pictures reduce the time required for incident investigation and their incontrovertible evidence avoids costly and time-consuming disputes. Here though the picture quality delivered by the camera may be key to the system’s effectiveness. A couple of typical examples.
A well-known parking fiddle involves taking a car park ticket without actually driving into the car park. However, if someone now tries this at Hohe Promenade, a so-called ‘ back-out’ ticket is generated, and an alarm triggers the recording of the relevant footage. If the ‘customer’ later claims that there was a pay station malfunction, then the ticket number enables staff to quickly retrieve the recordings and reveal the real sequence of events for all to see.
Fraudulent damage claims are a common problem. These are now countered by the system automatically documenting the condition of every vehicle entering the car park. With an event dataset comprised of the relevant image data and the vehicle licence number being automatically recorded whenever a ticket is requested at the entrance, it is now the parking firm says easy to check the veracity of any claim for damage to a vehicle and to rebut spurious ones.
Another management feature is the automatic recording of the scene whenever staff open up the pay station ticket machines. This footage can be archived and referred to even months later to resolve any cash discrepancies.
Besides the general perception of security which the technology has been able to generate, customers sometimes have another reason to appreciate it. Now that staff can search their database by registration number to discover when any vehicle came into the car park, this also means they can replace a lost ticket with an accurate duplicate, so that the customer only needs to pay what’s due and not the (often expensive) full-daily rate. Parking Zürich AG is hoping to introduce similar solutions to other sites.
