Montego Bay Opens Harbour Street Automated Parking Facility

The St James Municipal Corporation last Thursday brought into service Montego Bay’s first automated public car park, introducing what officials say is the first parking facility of its kind in western Jamaica.

The new site, on Harbour Street in downtown Montego Bay, gives drivers a technology-based option for leaving their vehicles while moving through the city. The automated system was installed by Innovative Core Solutions, a Montego Bay company.

Under the system, motorists receive a card when they enter the facility and settle their parking charge digitally when leaving. The amount payable is calculated based on the length of time the vehicle remains in the car park. Drivers may also sign up for short-term cards or choose cards tied to a monthly subscription.

Montego Bay Mayor Richard Vernon attended the commissioning and said the project fits into the corporation’s wider effort to bring more order to parking in the city while building Montego Bay’s profile as a technology-focused urban centre.

“This event underscores our greater vision for the city of Montego Bay, our urban renewal vision that we are undertaking right across the city. We are here to position Montego Bay as a tech-renewable city, and this automated car park is a small ladder for the greater vision that we have,” Vernon said during the launch.

Vernon said the municipality would ultimately prefer a multi-level parking facility at the site, but added that the current development should help strengthen revenue collection and support improved traffic management across Montego Bay.

“Ideally, we would love to have this car park as a multi-storey car park, but we are not there yet. This initiative will bring us to a stage where we can improve our revenues and bring about better order with traffic management across the city of Montego Bay, and will also feed into the greater vision of Montego Bay moving towards being a ‘smart city’,” Vernon added.

His comments connect with earlier appeals from the StJMC for a modern transportation centre in Montego Bay to help ease long-running congestion and parking problems across the western city. In 2022, then Transport Minister Audley Shaw said Montego Bay was to get a new transportation centre, with a projected 2023 opening, but that proposal was not realised.

Innovative Core Solutions operator Nicholas Thompson said more work is planned to improve the security side of the Harbour Street parking system.

“We are going to put in licence plate readers that will read the licence plates of persons who are registered in the system so, if you are registered, the licence plate reader will read your number and allow you entrance into the parking lot. I also intend to upgrade the system so that, by just looking at the barrier, it opens for you, and somebody else cannot drive your car and get in, because it is not registered to them,” Thompson said.

Thompson said the platform was designed with several safeguards to prevent misuse. “The system is built with different levels of security that are hard to get around. If you come in and then pass your card over the fence to give somebody else to come in, it is going to say you are already in,” he added.

The Harbour Street facility is part of continuing efforts to make Montego Bay more technologically advanced and to update the city’s transportation arrangements. It follows last August’s groundbreaking for a smart bus stop in Mt Salem, an initiative aimed at tackling the persistent problem of satellite taxi stands across Montego Bay.