Smart On-Street Parking: Survey of Actual Implementations in Cities and Insights from Practitioners

Abstract

Smart solutions for on-street parking, which collect and leverage real-time information about on-street parking space availability to guide drivers or adjust policies, have attracted considerable attention in academia and in the corporate world, but comprehensive feedback on actual implementations was still missing. Here, we survey around 25 smart parking (SP) implementations in cities across the world using online sources. To get more candid insights, we complement this objective review with case studies centred around interviews that we conducted with practitioners from ten cities across continents (San Francisco, Saint Pete Beach, Penang, Douala, Soissons, Grand Paris Seine Ouest, Montpellier, Frauenfeld, Zurich, Perth). Summing up our observations, we underline the broad diversity of SP implementations in terms of contexts and scales, from 2-to-3-year small-scale pilot studies to large deployments that take centre stage in a city's mobility policy. Technological choices also vary widely, from the ground sensors used in pioneering deployments in the early 2010s and still in use, to static cameras (which cover more spaces per device), and to mobile cameras with automatic licence-plate recognition embarked in roaming cars, a more and more popular solution for parking control. Different attitudes to the role given to smartphone applications are also noticed. But, importantly, not only means, but also goals differ: facilitating parking control and enhancing revenue, or providing data for a curb-pricing strategy, or feeding live data into navigation algorithms to reduce parking search times. Unfortunately, their level of achievement is seldom gauged with robust metrics. Hardware durability issues are mentioned as causes of premature termination, particularly for `first-generation' ground sensors, but so, too, are fluctuating political will and changing priorities. Smaller-scale, geographically isolated implementations and pilots are particularly vulnerable to these fluctuations, to discontinued funding or defaulting start-ups, and to limited public awareness.