Research Pays Off - Smart Parking Management to Boost Transit, Ease Congestion: Oakland, California Field Test Shows Promise

Traffic congestion in the San Francisco Bay Area is notorious, and the projected addition of 1 million new residents by 2020 will intensify the conditions. Increasing ridership on regional mass transit can reduce commuting time, but the rising costs of land prohibit efforts to construct new spaces at Bay Area Rapid Transit’s (BART’s) near capacity existing parking facilities.  To address the problem, the California Department of Transportation and BART requested California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) researchers to evaluate the feasibility of the smart parking concept for transit.  Smart parking systems typically provide real-time information to motorists via changeable message signs (CMSs) that post the number of available parking spaces in park and ride lots, the departure time of the next train, and the downstream roadway traffic conditions, as well as guidance to open spaces in park-and-ride lots. Quick, convenient automobile access to park-and-ride lots is seen as essential for transit to be competitive with the automobile, particularly in suburban areas.  The smart parking project showed that more efficient management of a transit station parking lot can improve access to transit and therefore increase ridership. By dynamically managing BART parking, the project helped to manage parking capacity effectively without a new capital expenditure for construction.  By enabling en route decision making through realtime parking information on a highway, the system encouraged a new group of commuters to take transit instead of driving the remainder of a trip, particularly when traffic congestion was significant.  As a result of the test, BART management has incorporated smart parking into the agency’s strategy and plans to introduce the technology to other stations in the system.