Smart Parking Data leads to Smart Parking in New Haven
Park New Haven Announces New Partnership with Smarking
NEW HAVEN, Conn. – (September 19, 2016) – The New Haven Parking Authority (Park New Haven), which maintains and manages over 8,000 public parking spots across 7 garages and numerous surface facilities in Downtown New Haven is pleased to announce a formal partnership with San Francisco, CA-based parking data analytics company, Smarking. The two entities will collaborate to share, integrate and visualize parking data for New Haven’s on and off street parking assets.
Smarking specializes in integrating parking data from parking systems (meters, mobile payments, revenue control equipment and others) into a single web based dashboard. In working with Park New Haven and the City of New Haven, Smarking is streaming data in real time from four distinct sources to create a holistic understanding of the parking dynamics within the City.
“I’ve long been an advocate for Professor Shoup’s policy ideas on parking” said Doug Hausladen, Director of Transportation, Traffic & Parking, City of New Haven and Executive Director for Park New Haven, referencing parking’s leading academic figure Donald Shoup, who advocates for using pricing as a mechanism for managing demand and reducing traffic associated with searching for a parking space. “We understand that parking is an ecosystem, what happens off street affects what happens on street. Smarking provides our team with the tools necessary to understand parking demand, durations, and revenues across all available inventory and timeframes. I’m proud of the progress we’ve made with Smarking through the pilot and are excited what else we can accomplish.”
The pilot between Smarking and Park New Haven laid the groundwork for a demand based pricing program. Pricing on and off street parking based on demand helps redistribute some long-term parkers to cheaper, less crowded, areas. This helps visitors and short-term parkers find available parking quickly rather than circling to look for a space. For instance, some blocks in New Haven almost always have in excess of 95% paid occupancy during the peak period – indicating a lack of available spaces. This causes driver frustration, cruising for parking, increased congestion and emissions. Meanwhile, there are blocks just a few blocks away are almost never above 50% paid occupancy. The goal of demand based pricing is to use limited parking resources more efficiently.
“Working with Doug and his team at New Haven has been a fascinating project for us and we couldn’t be more excited to continue our work there” said Kelly Clonts, Smarking’s lead Transportation Specialist, “from the start we’ve focused on providing our municipal client base with a holistic understanding of all parking inventory. Working with New Haven has been so rewarding simply because by integrating data sources across systems and organizations, we found a clear opportunity for new and improved parking policy. Our early analysis suggests that by reducing the price and time restrictions of parking in lower demand areas, and raising the price on select busy streets, the city can increase space availability, making parking more affordable for residents and make parking easier to find for visitors.”
Through the formal partnership, Smarking and Park New Haven plan to work with the city’s Board of Alders, downtown businesses, interested residents and others to implement many of the policy ideas uncovered during the pilot.
For more information on Park New Haven, please visit, www.ParkNewHaven.com, and for more on Smarking, please visit, www.Smarking.net.