Municipalities latch on to IntelliPark’s ‘smart’ meter

CEO of Bethesda company says he has a keen eye for inventions

Friday, July 14, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Naomi Brookner⁄The Gazette ‘‘My expertise is in picking products to go to market,” says Glen A. Hellman, CEO of IntelliPark of Bethesda, which develops and sells sonar-equipped parking meters.

Which is not surprising, considering he hails from Edison, N.J.

Hellman, CEO of IntelliPark LLC of Bethesda, has yet to find another Thomas Edison, the town’s namesake. But at IntelliPark, Hellman has teamed up with Vince Yost, whose sonar-smart parking meter is starting to tap national marketing potential.

In 1995 Yost patented a radio frequency sensor for a parking meter that detects the arrival and departure of a car in a parking space. Even since, he has been pitching it, under a company called Intelligent Devices, to municipalities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. But new competitors with a range of different electronic parking meters are cropping up across the country

IntelliPark has acquired the rights to Intelligent Devices’ patents. ‘‘With a large infusion of capital from our investors, we immediately devoted significant resources towards perfecting the vehicle-sensing parking meter,” Hellman said.

Hellman said he was recruited by one of the company’s investors, Carlton Capital Partners LLP, in December 2005 to see if the clever meter idea ‘‘has legs” in the marketplace.

‘‘I am not an inventor. But I can look at one and say, ‘Could you sell that and make it work?’” said Hellman, who studied marketing business at the University of Maryland, College Park. ‘‘I get involved in startups that have been around for a while. My expertise is in picking products to go to market.”

Previously, Hellman was CEO of Ikimbo Inc. of Herndon, Va.; president and COO of Astracon Inc. of Denver; and vice president and general manager of the operational support systems division at 3Com Corp. of Marlborough, Mass. He marketed the first integrated e-mail⁄voice mail system, Unified Messaging System, sold by 3Com.

Hyattsville officials recently decided to give the IntelliPark meter a try. On Monday, nine of the high-tech meters started tracking parkers in front of the Prince George’s County Courthouse.

‘‘We are looking at what kind of data we can get out of the meters,” said Robert Oliphant, Hyattsville city treasurer. The test will run eight weeks, he said — two weeks with the sonar off and six with it on.

‘‘We also want to test the reliability of the system because it is a relatively new product,” Oliphant said. ‘‘Before we go out and spend a bunch of money, we want to make sure they work.”

Hellman said the meters cost $175 each — comparable to conventional meters — plus a $7 monthly leasing fee for the sonar sensors.

The company is one of several trying to persuade municipalities to switch over from their mechanical, battery-powered parking meters to newer electronic versions that can boost parking revenues or at least improve enforcement of parking penalties.

Martin Stein, executive director of the National Parking Association, called the proliferation of smart parking meters in a significant number of U.S. cities ‘‘a great thing.”

‘‘The technology is being advanced dramatically by many of the suppliers now,” Stein said. ‘‘Once consumers get used to the change, it will be much more convenient to them” and, if properly enforced, should increase revenues for municipalities.

The most noticeable difference between the IntelliPark meters and conventional models is no more ‘‘time on the meter.” When the vehicle leaves the space, the meter falls back to zero. That can generate 20 percent to 50 percent more parking revenue for the municipality, Hellman said.

The meters can also track violations, so municipalities can monitor the effectiveness of their parking enforcement efforts. They also prevent drivers from ‘‘feeding” the meters past the allotted time limit.

Yost has tested and installed IntelliPark smart meters in Reading and Pottstown, Pa., while Hellman is working with municipal managers in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

The company’s first revenues are from Reading, which bought 280 units this month. Circuit Tech Assembly LLC of Moorestown, N.J., manufactures the meters.

The company’s business plan is to operate the new meters in several municipalities in the mid-Atlantic region and continue raising funds to market nationally. IntelliPark began in 1999 with venture capital from Winston Partners, which was co-founded by Marvin P. Bush, the president’s brother, and Carlton Capital, which have invested upward of $10 million, Hellman said. The company has eight employees.

With Yost’s idea having floated through municipal managers’ offices for several years, ‘‘I thought the problem would be to sell these things to local municipalities,” Hellman said. ‘‘To me that was going to be the issue. I was prepared for how expensive it would it be to take it out to 6,000 different organizations.”

But a quick study of the invention showed Hellman that there was no lack of demand. Municipalities wanted it.

‘‘They said, ‘Can you make it work better?’ So, it went from a marketing test to an engineering test,” he said.

In January, Hellman recruited the help of the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering, which has more than $50 million in testing equipment to help develop competitive electronic components, products and systems for the likes of NASA, Boeing, Motorola and many other makers and users of electronics.

After three days, engineers Mike Azarian and Mike Pecht suggested new coating materials for the circuit boards.

Besides Reading and Hyattsville, the company’s improved meters have been tested at two other undisclosed towns ‘‘inside the Beltway,” pending new contracts, Hellman said.

In one trial in Maryland, the IntelliPark meters showed managers that only 40 percent of drivers actually paid for parking.

‘‘The management thought they had great enforcement,” Hellman said. ‘‘But parkers thought that enforcement was not that good and were taking that gamble that the chance of getting a ticket versus paying was worth it. They found they were not getting tickets.”

Hellman said his company also has a prototype, not yet tested, of its next generation meter, a radio version that takes credit cards or cell phone calls for payment. Drivers can call the meter to add time. The meter will call back to tell the driver time is up.

IntelliPark’s sales pitch is not based on catching parking offenders or even helping municipalities make more money on parking. Instead, Hellman said, they tell managers that the smart meters enhance the overall business community by ensuring a steady turnover in metered spaces.

He begins by recommending that municipalities use the meter to offer a grace period of five to 15 minutes that would be put on the meter automatically when a vehicle pulls into a space.

‘‘Parking meters are not meant to generate revenue, but to change or drive public behavior for what is good for the municipality, the city and the neighborhood,” he said.

For example, spaces next to stores have one- or two-hour meters rather than eight-hour meters so that spaces more frequently open up for shoppers.

‘‘You put long-term parkers in parking lots,” he said, not in front of stores. ‘‘There is not much revenue generated by a 15-minute stop to the dry cleaners or to buy a pack of gum.”