Statistics

• Fybr deployed approximately 11,000 sensors.

• Reduction in Time Reported to Find an Available Space

  • 43% in Pilot Areas vs. 13% in Control Areas

• On-Street Target Occupancy Rate (60% to 80%)

  • Achievement Rate Increased 31% in Pilot Areas vs 6% in Control Areas

• Two-Year City Parking Tax $ Increase

  • $6.5M in Pilot Areas, implying a $26M Increase in City and Private Parking Revenue (Taxed at 25%)

• Two-Year City Parking Tax % Increase

  • 43% in Pilot Areas vs 3% in Control Areas

• Two-Year City Parking Revenue $ Increase (Non-Tax)

  • $3.8M in Pilot Areas

• Reduction in Citations

  • 23% in Pilot Areas

• Reduction in Double-Parking

  • 22% in Pilot Areas vs. 5% in Control Areas

• Parking Availability

  • Increase of 16% in Pilot Areas vs. Decrease of 50% in Control Areas

• Garage Utilization Increase

  • 11% in Pilot Areas, which far exceeded non-SFpark garages, according to the SFMTA

• Average Payment Compliance on Weekdays

  • Increased 23% in Pilot Areas

• Greenhouse Gas Emissions Decrease

  • 30% in Pilot Areas vs 6% in Control Areas

Project Context

From the city: “Prior to SFpark…parking rates and fines were used to achieve turnover goals through short time limits as well as, often, to increase revenues to balance budgets. Rates were not tied to transportation policy goals, and rates at on-street meters were the same all day every day, regardless of demand. Meter rates were set lower than the rates at municipal garages, giving drivers financial incentive to circle to find on-street parking. The historical approach…has been reasonably effective, but it is not convenient for drivers, nor does it explicitly manage towards creating parking availability and thereby achieving broader goals for the city or its transportation system.”

“How cities manage parking really matters, as how we manage parking can help us be more successful as a city. When parking is difficult to find, many people double park or circle to find a space. This circling doesn’t just waste time and fuel—it’s also dangerous. Circling drivers are distracted drivers making lots of right and left turns who are more likely to hit someone crossing the street, a cyclist, or another car.”

“Parking also affects economic competitiveness—if very few spaces are available, fewer people can access our commercial districts. The reality or even just the perception that it is hard to find a parking space in a particular area can hurt its economic vitality.”

Project Goals and Strategies

Enter SFPark, a study conducted by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (“SFMTA”) which manages the city’s transportation network, including local public transit, walking, biking, roads, on-street parking, parking enforcement, and a significant portion of the city’s off-street parking supply. SFPark used several strategies and technologies to achieve the overall goals of making it easier to find a space, improving the parking experience, and achieving better outcomes for the city. SFPark is likely the largest documented smart parking deployment and study in United States history.

Specific strategies used included:

• Demand-responsive pricing

• Making it easier to pay and avoid citations

• Longer time limits

• Improved user interface and product design

• Improved information for drivers, including static directional signs to garages and real-time information about where parking is available on-and off-street

• Highly transparent, rules-based, and data-driven approach to making changes to parking prices

At the heart of SFPark’s strategy was a target on-street parking occupancy goal between 60% - 80%, a concept championed by Donald Shoup, a renowned urban planning scholar who is widely regarded as the father of modern parking best practices. This strategy balances load across parking inventory, makes parking easier to find, and increases the perceived accessibility of parking for the benefit of local businesses, among other benefits.

Fybr's Role

Fybr was the turnkey provider of parking sensor hardware, maintenance, and data delivery. Fybr designed, manufactured, installed, and maintained all of the sensor and sensor-supporting hardware used on the project, including approximately 11,000 parking sensors monitoring all motorist arrival and departure information. The data collected by Fybr was transmitted electronically to the SFpark database.

With Fybr’s help, the city was able to collect and utilize real-time data to identify and communicate parking availability and implement demand-responsive pricing to help make parking easier to find and balance load across the city’s parking inventory. Specifically for on-street parking, SFpark used occupancy data from Fybr’s sensors in each space to adjust rates at meters up or down to help achieve the target occupancy rate of 60–80%.

From the city: “At the heart of the SFpark approach is demand-responsive pricing, whereby the SFMTA gradually and periodically adjusted rates at meters and in garages up or down. The goal was to achieve a minimum level of availability so that it was easy to find a parking space most of the time on every block and that garages always have some open spaces available. Furthermore, meeting target availability also means improving utilization of parking so that spaces—on-street or off—would not sit unused. In this approach, the SFMTA was obligated to find the lowest rates possible to achieve its goals. As a result, average rates at garages and meters decreased over the course of the pilot period." 

SFPark Reflections

From the city: “As one part of dramatically improving the experience of parking in San Francisco, SFpark focused on improving parking availability by better managing demand for existing parking supply. In other words, SFpark was a demonstration of how we could manage our existing parking as intelligently as possible to maximize its benefit for the city. SFpark was intended to make parking more convenient for drivers while also delivering wider benefits such as improving transit speed or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Besides addressing the parking problems we see today, SFpark was intended to enable the city to grow more gracefully into the future.”

“This data management tool and how it is used by the SFMTA is also an instance of “smart cities” actively using data to make smarter decisions and achieve more with the same resources. The data management system developed for SFpark allowed the SFMTA to use data to manage contracts more effectively, make highly data-driven decisions to adjust parking prices, provide a real-time data feed, increase the efficiency and capabilities for parking operations, and enable a new level of analytical rigor for this evaluation as well as ongoing reporting and ad hoc analysis.”

SFPark remains a shining example of how collecting and analyzing parking data can enable numerous benefits, well beyond initial goals.