City Brain Parking Network (Pay-After-You-Leave)
Since July 2019, Hangzhou has linked parking facilities citywide into a "pay-after-you-leave" network: drivers register a licence plate once, then exit any connected garage without stopping to pay. By 2024 more than 1.6 million spaces were connected. It shares the City Brain brand but is run by the municipal urban-management bureau, not Alibaba's traffic-signal platform.
📊 Impact
By February 2024: 1.6 million+ parking spaces connected, 4 million+ registered users, 250 million+ transactions, and average exit time down from roughly 40 to 10 seconds per vehicle.
🎓 Lesson
"City Brain" is a brand covering several separately launched, separately operated city systems — this parking network (2019, city management bureau) is not the same project as the 2016 traffic-signal system, even though both share the name.
📖 Terms in this entry: Adaptive traffic signals · Digital twin · LoRaWAN
Sources
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “City Brain Parking Network (Pay-After-You-Leave)” — Hangzhou, China. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/hangzhou-smart-parking/ (last verified 2026-08-03). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.