Driving Curbs Forward with Occupancy Insights
Populus has continued to expand our parking analytics, empowering our city partners to review demand stats and surface insights, recommendations, and opportunities for optimizing the curb. Why? Cities need to quantify curb demand in order to understand usage and identify whether policy or price adjustments are needed to align behavior with city goals.
Typically cities will engage external consultants to conduct a parking study to gather this information. However, there is no industry standard for how regularly to complete these assessments. And due to the time and resource investments required, many cities are unable to complete them as often as they might hope.
As such, cities often use parking transactions as a proxy for true occupancy when they aren’t able to do an occupancy study. An occupancy study does capture all curb events however it provides a point-in-time snapshot of what is happening, consisting of just 2-3 days worth of data. Parking transactions provide a much larger dataset so anomalies are smoothed out and trends can be identified across extended time spans.
It may be split across disparate systems, but most cities have the parking transaction data today to complete a preliminary analysis of:
Occupancy and turnover trends,
the impacts of parking policy changes,
the efficacy of parking programs,
performance metrics for paid parking areas,
key hot spots for parking demand,
And where there may be underutilization issues.
The ability to quickly access occupancy, turnover, and utilization allows cities to combat apocryphal information with concrete data in discussions with stakeholders. It also allows cities to make better pricing decisions and even set on-demand parking rates and embrace dynamic pricing based on real-time usage.
Populus’s Parking Insights has integrated with parking vendors to provide cities with an easily accessible and readable view of curbside utilization. The Populus team has harnessed our expertise to deliver the charts and graphs most commonly needed by city staff in internal discussions, council reports, and stakeholder engagement.
Digestible and Configurable Reporting:
Trends by Day:
Cities can view how utilization changes by hour over the week to identify which hours have peak usage and if paid parking time spans should be extended.
Historical Comparisons:
Cities can view a historical comparison of before and after for each day of week, month, or quarter to visualize and understand the impact of any parking changes.
Trends Over Time:
For those who want to dive further into the details, they can view a calendar heatmap to help pinpoint irregularities.
Geospatial Analysis:
There’s even a way to view specific areas or curb zones to find hotspots.
For cities who want to leverage parking data for better decisions, Populus’s Parking Insights can provide a good starting point in understanding and managing curb usage. Get started today to unlock the efficient evaluation of current curb use, policy impacts, and future demand planning in a dynamic interface.