6 Trends We Heard on the IPMI Show Floor
What Parking Operators Are Really Asking For in 2026
Every conference reaches a point when the small talk fades, and people start sharing what’s really on their minds. The budgets that are under pressure, the garages that fill up in all the wrong ways, and the technology investments that never quite delivered on their promises.
That’s where the most valuable conversations begin.
The Ensight team just got back from the International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI) Conference and Expo in Milwaukee, and the conversations were invaluable. Operators got honest about what they want from parking guidance in 2026 and beyond. Below are the key themes that we heard the most:
1. Parking occupancy signage should reflect campus identity, not fight it
Universities want real-time occupancy and wayfinding, but they absolutely do not want it to look like an afterthought. These are campuses that have spent years getting their brand right, down to the typeface on every sign on campus, and a parking display that looks like it wandered in from a highway throws the whole entrance off.
Parking guidance works best when it complements the environment rather than competing with it.
2. Permits aren’t just about a sticker
We expected to talk hardware. Instead, operator after operator wanted to talk permits, and not the stickers. The data.
Picture one garage holding faculty, student, visitor, and reserved permits – each behaving completely differently across the day, and a team making supply decisions for all of them with almost no view into who is actually parked where, and when. That is where a lot of operators are stuck, making confident calls on shaky information. What they want is visibility, hour-by-hour, so allocation finally matches reality and every permit holder still gets a spot.
3. Real-time availability is no longer a differentiator, it’s expected
A few years ago, accurate live availability was the thing you put in the brochure. In Milwaukee, it was just assumed. The whole point is the driver who reads the number trusts it and parks in under a minute, instead of looping the lot three times getting more frustrated.
That trust is fragile. Show a driver one wrong count and they will never trust the sign again. Which is the truth under all of it: accuracy is not a feature of the product. Accuracy is the product.
4. EV spaces only create value when they turn over
The EV conversation has grown up. Nobody is asking “should we add chargers” anymore. They are asking how to keep the chargers they already paid for from sitting blocked all day by a car that finished two hours ago, or never needed to charge at all, while the driver who actually needs it circles past.
The fix operators kept describing is two-handed: guide drivers to the open EV spots, and keep those spots turning over. That is how an EV investment earns its keep, instead of just looking good in theory.
5. The market is done overpaying for complexity
If one theme was the soundtrack of the week, it was this. Operators are tired of giant, infrastructure-heavy systems that cost a fortune, take forever, and answer questions nobody asked. What they want now sounds almost refreshingly reasonable: simple, accurate, reliable, affordable, and supported for the entire life of the contract, not waved goodbye at install.
We may have smiled at this one, because it is the exact idea we built EnSight around. Less hardware, more insight, and a team still picking up the phone long after go-live.
6. Public agencies want a faster path to “yes”
A steady stream of municipal, university, and airport teams brought up the same headache: procurement. They want parking guidance and occupancy systems without disappearing into a year-long RFP. Cooperative purchasing keeps coming up as the shortcut that lets a public agency move this year instead of next.
That is exactly why EnSight is available through OMNIA as part of Lion National Corp. (LNC). For municipalities, universities, and airports, it turns a turnkey deployment into something you can actually act on, skipping the RFP marathon and getting from “we should look into this” to a live system in a fraction of the time.
The thread running through all of it
Strip away the specifics and every conversation in Milwaukee pointed the same direction. The industry isn’t looking for more technology for technology’s sake. It wants the right technology, deployed sensibly, and supported by people who stick around. That is a conversation we are happy to be in the middle of, and one we have been having since long before this show floor.
Thank you to everyone who stopped by the booth and told us the truth. If we ran out of time before we ran out of conversation, let’s finish it.
For more information about EnSight Technologies and its parking occupancy management and guidance solutions, visit www.ensight-technologies.com.
About EnSight Technologies
EnSight Technologies is a parking technology company that has set out to simplify parking guidance with smart technology. EnSight’s smart, simple, and scalable technology ecosystem offers a cost-effective alternative to parking occupancy management and guidance for parking owners and operators of all sizes. The company can be found at www.ensight-technologies.com.
