A Cambridge-based tech firm is pioneering apps to let you park more easily, tell local councils when to grit or even light up particular roads

Driving in Moscow can be a hair-raising experience. The city suffers some of the worst congestion in the world and parking spaces are often impossible to find. But now, with the help of technology developed by a British company, drivers in the Russian capital can get ahead in the race to find a space.

Along with St Petersburg and Minsk, the, Moscow is the location for a pilot project using technology from Telensa, a company based outside Cambridge, that can tell drivers exactly when and where a parking spot is vacant, saving numerous trips around the block.

The technology behind the project is simple, says Tim Jackson, co-founder of the company. “It is a magnetic sensor which goes in the road. When the car parks over the top of it, it detects the car is there.” There is a website that pinpoints the available spaces for drivers and electronic road signs also point them in the right direction.

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Telensa works in the development of “smart cities”, where technology is used to improve the running of an urban area. This includes everything from identifying which roads to grit when it snows, to turning on lights when police are pursuing a suspect.

Central to this has been the company’s development of smart streetlights. These can be controlled and monitored remotely, and was the first use of the technology now helping drivers in Moscow.

Just over a decade ago, Jackson and his co-founder, Will Gibson, were looking for a use for the radio technology they had developed that communicated small amounts of information over long distances. Streetlights, which traditionally operated individually and were turned on and off by sensors, were ripe for innovation.

The Ultra-Narrow-Band (UNB) technology developed allows local authorities to monitor lights remotely, using programmes to switch them on and off when required. The lights can be controlled as a group instantly with outages spotted from a distance.

“[Local authorities] can establish, for example, do they want the lights to come on in accordance with the following daylight or do they just want them on at a fixed time? Do they want to dim the lights in certain areas from 10pm to 5am or do they want maybe a deeper level of dimming but for fewer hours, maybe from 1am to 4am? It’s all configurable by them,” says Gibson, Telensa chief executive.

The communications system uses nodes attached to the streetlights to control them – which in turn communicate with electronic base stations via UNB from up to 5 miles away. The base stations in turn communicate with the controller via a 3G dongle and the authorities can manipulate the lights as they want.

Using this system, the lights can be dimmed at certain times to save energy – which some local authorities have used despite concern from motoring and pedestrian groups – or turn the lights on if there is a call from police about criminal activity.

Local authorities can ascertain when lights are broken and can send out crews to fix them specifically instead of the historical system in which staff would manually carry out inspections at night and then other crews would be sent to fix them, says Gibson.

The UK is a world leader in the field of smart lighting, he said, and 700,000 of the 7m streetlights across Britain are fitted with the Telensa technology. Essex county council uses the greatest number at 130,000 while there are also systems in Coventry, Sheffield and Birmingham.

The company met success when streetlights were upgraded after a huge underspend from 1995 to 2005. Each node costs £45, with networks consisting of 10,000 lights or more.

It’s all about the right light at the right time, says Gibson, saving energy and minimising waste. For example, a project in Doncaster with 33,000 streetlights, launched last year, will save £1.3m each year from reduced energy consumption.

It is the same fundamental technology the company now uses in systems to spot parking spaces. Other uses are also being developed, including systems which can detect a vehicle parking without permission in a residents’ parking zone.

“If you had a system which detected if someone had parked and had not paid and then the traffic warden would have an app which said: ‘Bay five on such and such a street, there is someone who has parked and not paid.’ He can go and put the ticket on. So you are reducing the costs of the enforcement,” adds Jackson.

Other uses include connecting sensors for weather monitoring, in which councils can detect more accurately which areas need to be gritted in snow storms, avoiding the cost of unnecessary gritting.

In the UK, about one in five streetlights are smart, according to Gibson, through both Telensa technology and competitors. Trials have been carried out in Australia and Brazil, among other countries, while the US, where electric companies control millions of lights, is also a potentially lucrative market. In January, Telensa announced it had secured £12.5m in venture capital from the Environmental Technologies Fund and the Silicon Valley Bank.