Lesson
In planning for a demand-responsive pricing based parking management system, involve executive leadership, seek strong intellectual foundations, strike the right balance between complexity and simplicity, and emphasize data collection and project evaluation.
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s experience in implementing advanced parking management (Interim Results).
August 2011
San Francisco; California; United States
Background (Show)
Lesson Learned
The SFpark pilot project of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) uses a demand-based approach to adjusting parking rates at metered parking spaces in the SFpark pilot areas and at SFpark garages. SFpark’s combination of time-of-day demand-responsive pricing and off-peak discounts at garages is expected to reduce circling and double-parking, as well as influence when and how people choose to travel. Lessons learned from the project planning aspect of the SFpark pilot project are presented below.
- Do not underestimate the scope of work. It is easy to underestimate the scope, magnitude, and technological sophistication necessary to offer real-time parking data and provide demand responsive pricing. Agencies should develop the scope carefully incorporating expectations as well as challenges.
- Involve executive leadership. Many challenges accompanied planning and implementing a ground-breaking project with complex technology, significant policy changes, and a large amount of discovery and uncertainty. The support of a dedicated executive at the agency was critical, as was having appropriate financial resources.
- Understand the parking supply. Starting with the maxim that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” the SFMTA collected comprehensive data about San Francisco’s publicly available parking supply, both on and off-street, including existing parking regulations. Enabled by data, understanding the existing parking supply characteristics was a critical first step in the planning and implementation of the SFpark pilot project and will be just as important for its evaluation.
- Seek strong and coherent intellectual foundations. SFpark parking management approach was based on the pioneering academic work of Professor Donald Shoup from University of California, Los Angeles. Those foundations made it easier to develop policies, goals, and tools that were easily communicated and understood by our customers. An academic advisory team offered early guidance and support for the design of SFpark demonstration and how it could offer valuable data for evaluation of outcome.
- Strike the right balance between complexity and simplicity. SFpark had to balance the potential complexity of managing parking effectively with the need to have something simple enough to be communicated clearly and quickly to customers. It had to strike a similar technological balance between what is desirable and what is feasible.
- Emphasize data collection and project evaluation. As a federally funded demonstration of a new approach to managing parking, the SFpark project is collecting an unprecedented data set to enable a thorough evaluation of its effectiveness. This improved the project’s credibility among stakeholders.
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Systems Engineering
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Concept of Operations
Systems Engineering Project/Technical Management
Keywords
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Lesson ID: 2012-00621
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