Pay-by-space parking meter poles and numbered space markers are currently being installed on select streets in Downtown Washington, DC, USA one of the first signs of the District Department of Transportation's (DDOT) parkDC pilot parking program being tested in Chinatown-Penn Quarter this year.
According to DDOT, the parking pilot aims to help change the way everyone parks Downtown.The concept (multimodal value pricing) has been widely successful in areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles where parking search times and congestion have been reduced with implementation. There, and in the Downtown DC pilot, parking charges are assigned to individual spaces based on demand or “value pricing.” Through a system of monitoring, street parking prices will be raised in some areas and lowered in others in the hopes of drawing drivers to less congested streets to park and encouraging others to find alternate means of transportation.
As part of the program, real-time information on parking will be made available online. Visitors to Downtown will be able to go online or access an app and see parking availability and pricing by street in real-time. This should make it easier for drivers to find an open spot and will help them locate less expensive spaces that may be a few blocks away from the highest-congestion roads.
The first step in the parking pilot is making the 1,300 designated spaces into pay-by-space parking by installing numbered meter signs for each space, new parking meters where necessary and new machines where uses can pay for parking.
Next, sensors will be installed in some spaces to monitor parking usage and the city will begin using CCTV cameras to monitor others. Information from those technologies, in addition to data from pay-by-phone users and the new meters themselves, will then be collected and analyzed and pricing will be adjusted based on demand.
DDOT estimates price changes will be rolled out this summer based on their first data collection and updated quarterly thereafter.
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