The New Science of Parking

If you live in a city and drive a car, chances are you know the hassles of looking for a place to park. Studies of traffic congestion in New York and Los Angeles have found that cruising for parking is, in fact, a major source of gridlock. In a 2006 study undertaken in a Brooklyn neighborhood by Transportation Alternatives, a New York-based advocacy group, 45% of drivers interviewed admitted they were simply looking for a parking spot. A more rigorous analysis was conducted in Los Angeles by Dr. Donald Shoup, an urban planning professor at UCLA and one of the nation's top parking gurus. Over the course of a year, he and his students found, the search for curb parking in a 15-block business district "created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel — equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon," which consumes "47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide."

Urban planners and economists have been trying for years to find solutions to the plethora of traffic problems that afflict urban communities. Now a growing number of cities are turning to the relatively new science of parking theory and the technologies it has spawned for help — to improve their neighborhoods, reduce pollution and kick-start economic growth.

Shoup's solution to reducing congestion due to cruising — which he chronicles in his book The High Cost of Free Parking — begins by raising the cost of street parking to market value. That requires the installation of meters where none currently exist and the setting of rates for metered spots that is proportional to the prices charged in off-street lots. Such market-value parking is not simply a cash-grab; it is about obtaining an optimal balance between occupancy and vacancy. "Ensuring 85% occupancy means that the curb spaces will be well used," says Shoup, "and the 15% vacancy means that they will be readily available."

The idea of market-value pricing to reduce congestion has been around at least since 1952, when economist William Vickery floated the idea to relieve congestion in New York City. But it was not until 1996, when Vickery received a Nobel Prize in economics, that his work, and the idea of congestion pricing, began attracting attention. The lack of early support for market-pricing, says Patrick Siegman, a principal transit consultant with Nelson/Nygaard, was mostly rooted in an inability to measure results. "New technologies are making it much easier to implement ideas that economists have been suggesting for a long time," he says, "and that is leading to some remarkable changes in parking policy."

A San Francisco-based company called Streetline, for example, offers what CEO Tod Dykstra calls a "congestion management system," which includes parking sensors and wireless networked meters. The sensors, engineered using the same principles that make a compass operate, create a unique parking signature for each vehicle, which can determine, based on variations in parking angles and size of vehicles, when a parking space is filled, when a vehicle departs and when a new vehicle replaces it. Wireless networked meters enable parking officials to instantly determine not only who pays up and who doesn't, but also the total revenue for parking by meter, by street and by district based on time of day or day of the week.

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