Designing an Integrated Smart Parking Application

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in city living. Associated with this trend are parking problems in city centers and central business districts. Using the City of Pittsburgh as a case study, our study identifies a critical parking issue and how best it could be ameliorated. The study reveals that a demand-side intervention; providing real-time and predictive information to parking users, provides the most robust option in addressing the lack of parking availability in downtown Pittsburgh. Towards this end, we design a schema for an integrated smart parking application project and discuss how its functionalities could be enhanced as well as how it could be replicated in other cities. The development of the schema also includes a robust needs assessment and a user centric design process. The use of an open source platform, modular structure and ease of retrofitting can enable other cities to lower the cost of implementing and managing similar smart parking solutions.

Keywords: Integrated Smart Parking, Needs Assessment, Environmental Scan, User Centered Design, Schema

JEL Classification: R4