The Parking Technology Revolution is Here

These services are being embraced by millions of travelers who are using their smartphones to arrange for trips by car, shuttle, and public transit, as well as for short-term rental of cars and bicycles. These new services epitomize today’s sharing economy and allow an increasing number of people to enjoy the mobility benefits of an automobile without owning one. They may also encourage others to leave their personal vehicle at home for the day, reduce the number of vehicles in their household, or even forgo having one at all.

Shared mobility goals include:

• Improving the efficiency of existing mobility infrastructure. Adding more infrastructure is simply not an option in many urban environments. Using technology, we can move people, vehicles, and goods more efficiently through the existing infrastructure.

• Increasing the capacity of the existing mobility infrastructure. The goal here is to move more people, vehicles, and goods through the existing infrastructure.

• Changing the behaviors of urban travelers. This is about influencing the choices that travelers make toward options that reduce congestion. Agencies that implement dynamic pricing can reduce traffic congestion in all-electronic toll collection and/or on-street parking situations, using pricing as a mechanism to influence driver choices. Smart parking programs help to increase space availability and reduce pollution and congestion by helping drivers get to a parking spot at their desired price point sooner. Incorporating telecommuting into the office culture helps to keep people and vehicles off the roads during the day. Providing accessible multimodal options such as ridesharing, car sharing, and public transportation via mobility apps creates opportunities to make different choices that can result in less personal vehicle usage and less congestion.

3. Technologies that Improve Access and Payment

Where does technology fit into curb management? Technology can be used to monitor the curb space, track usage, and provide data for improved resource management. By collecting real-time data on parking usage at the curb level, parking professionals can adjust parking rates to achieve defined occupancy targets and better balance peak demands. Several cities across the US are piloting projects where the curb space is being dynamically priced to more appropriately allocate parking. Cities are also looking for ways to make the parking experience as frictionless as possible for commercial vehicles. In an ideal world a commercial vehicle would pull up to a designated commercial vehicle loading zone along the curb, load or unload, then drive away without pulling a parking ticket, starting an app-based parking session, or putting change in a meter. The frictionless system will simply charge the vehicle owner for the time they occupied the curb space. There are electronic transponder-based systems and location-based systems that support these frictionless systems. A transponder-based system relies on a small transponder placed in the vehicle and roadside units that recognize when the vehicle is parked in the space. The roadside unit communicates wirelessly back to a central system that confirms that the vehicle parked in the space is properly credentialed and then it starts and stops the parking session. The location-based system relies on fleet operators integrating an Application Programming Interface (API)into their vehicle tracking system. The location of the vehicle is communicated to a central system when the vehicle enters and leaves a geofenced zone. Both systems leverage the presence of a vehicle in a designated parking zone to appropriately charge the user for the time that the curb space was occupied.

Parking without technology is not easily managed. It is important for decision-makers in the parking industry to understand the policies and technologies that are available to solve their parking challenges. Cities should share lessons learned about the challenges and solutions they’ve implemented with other cities. Data-driven resource management, advancing shared mobility applications, and technology can play a critical role in delivering more efficient, better managed, and more customer friendly urban parking and access systems when integrated into a larger urban area plan.