CMS and GIS

LAZ Parking / Chicago Meters

LAZ Parking / Chicago Meters is responsible for operating the City of Chicago’s metered parking system.  Since taking over the management of these meters from the City, one of its goals was to move towards a kiosk-based parking system.  Instead of using coins at an old-style meter, people would instead pay at one of many centrally located kiosks with more flexible payment options.  To help in the transition toward this new parking system, Chicago Meters quickly needed a public facing website to convey information to Chicagoland parkers about the new system.  The website also had to provide funtionality that allowed people to quickly find a kiosk based on a Chicago address.  To accomplish this, Bantix added a map component that searched for and displayed the closest kiosks based on an address entered by the user.

In addition to the public website, Bantix also had to provide an administrative site that allowed authorized users to manage the parking kiosk data.  The site had to allow both bulk updates and individiual kiosk data updates.  The parking kiosks were being installed at a rate of 30 per day, so keeping the data fresh on the public website required frequent imports of data that reflected the new installations.  Bantix also provided a mapping component to the admin site that allowed data corrections to individual kiosks.  This gave the user a point and click interface to drag kiosks on a map to make adjustments to it's location.

Because Bantix anticipated frequent website content changes, we used the Umbraco content management system to build the website and store the content.  Google Maps, JQuery, and JavaScript were used to display the locations of the Chicago Meter parking kiosks on the public website.  The administrative site was written using Visual Studio 2008, ASP.NET MVC, C#, JavaScript, LINQ to SQL, and SQL Server 2005.  Google Maps was also used on the administrative site to provide geocoding and the point and click map interface.