SFPark, a federally funded San Francisco parking management program, is a notable exception: One organization, SFMTA, oversees all parking and is thus well-positioned to centralize and standardize citywide parking data. Google and others have created standard application programming interfaces to facilitate greater coordination among developers, and software developers such as ParkMe are amassing formidable private databases by working with municipalities one-by-one to harmonize the data. Despite select bright spots, siloed data remains a persistent and costly barrier to greater adoption of smart parking regimes and to ITS more generally.
Software
Software is the brains behind active parking management. Real-time and predictive software algorithms process data ranging from images and time stamps at parking garage entrances to GPS coordinates on users’ phones to determine driver location and parking availability, delivering it all through a user-friendly and interactive interface. ParkMe is a parking app that uses a combination of real-time and historical data to predict parking availability for a given city block. Such real-time availability forecast algorithms, perhaps launching from the smart parking test bed, could be central to better traffic management since accurately predicting jams and roadblocks is critical to providing users with alternatives that can avoid or overcome them.
Visualization and integration with existing web applications could be key to scaling transportation and parking software solutions. Parker, an app provided by Streetline, recently released a custom map generator that allows merchants, universities, cities and parking providers to showcase nearby parking options via any website.
Sensors
Steetline, SFPark and LAExpressPark, among others, rely on physical sensors embedded in the pavement in each parking spot to generate parking data. Most sensors detect something in their proximity through ultrasonic technology. They sell the sensors to their customers, primarily municipalities, and usually provide a software app along with them as one package.
Smartphone Integration
Other companies, ParkMe among them, wonder whether quality data can be generated without the sensors, whose installation tends to be a large expense -- about $1,400 each according to the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley (Rodier et al 2010).
Smartphones are now equipped with GPS with resolution around 10 meters and they continue to approach the quality of handheld GPS units with resolution within one meter -- good enough to differentiate among individual parking spots. Another smartphone-based approach is to use a “Hybrid Indoor Positioning Engine,” which fuses Wireless Local Area Network signals (currently used in the “Current Location” function of many map apps) and the measurements of the built-in sensors of smartphones to determine both location and mode of transport.
A smartphone application called on{X} provides an open-source platform allowing users to program their phones to automatically sense when they are parked. The application works by actively monitoring the phone’s built-in accelerometer and sensing a change from driving to walking. It then automatically records the location of your parking spot through one of the locating techniques described above.
Smartphones and connected vehicles with embedded software capabilities can also perform real-time parking space selection optimization, in part based on real-time awareness of other vehicles’ location, to revise a previous parking spot choice in case a previously selected space is taken by another driver or a closer spot becomes available. Users provide parameters such as proximity to destination and parking cost, and the app does the rest.
Payment can also be seamlessly completed through the phone with apps like PayByPhone.
Innovative Pricing
Shoup of UCLA and the Freakonomics Radio broadcast has estimated that 30 percent of city drivers in dense urban areas are searching for parking. By employing demand-responsive pricing, parking can be shifted away from peak times and areas, increasing availability and throughput (and therefore parking revenue) while reducing traffic congestion. With dwindling revenues from gas taxes looming as vehicles become more efficient, such pricing mechanisms can help to bolster budgets for infrastructure improvements even as they provide the data indicating where improvements are most needed.
Next page: Is there a business case?
