Smart parking system: Awareness and problems among shopping mall's customers

The issues of insufficient parking are getting worse when the numbers of vehicles keep increasing day by day. Therefore, there are mobile applications such as Smart Parking System (SPS) that are implemented to assist the vehicle owners to get the parking space. SPS give benefits to the users as it can reserve the parking in advance through the mobile apps before they reach the destination. Although there are many benefits of SPS, but not many users are aware of the system. Thus, the aim of this research is to increase the awareness on SPS and the objectives are to determine the level of awareness on SPS, to identify the problems in using SPS and to recommend the methods to improve the usage of SPS in shopping malls. Questionnaire surveys were conducted among 300 customers in the IOI City Mall, Setia Walk Mall and DC Mall in Selangor and the data were analysed by using SPS version 21.0. The findings show that only 50% of respondents aware and another 50% are unaware of SPS. On the other hand, it is found that they have problems in term of price and payment and also mobile network. It is recommended that by improving the SPS policy, parking price and payment, increase number reserved parking, charged with the fined, implement License Plate Recognition (LPR) and provide password or RFID tags, will help to improve the usage of SPS.