Smart Parking Value Pricing Pilot on COASTER Commuter Rail Line in San Diego, California

Advances in sensor, payment, and enforcement technologies are creating new opportunities to operate parking facilities more efficiently by enhancing customer parking experiences and improving data collection, enforcement, and revenue collection. Increasingly, transit authorities are harnessing these technologies to better serve a broader range of passenger market segments, and thereby increase ridership and revenue. In the short-term, these innovations promise to increase the effective supply of existing parking with minimal capital investment. Over the longer-term, these systems could further expand ridership by generating revenue to add parking capacity and improving first mile access. This paper reports on the Smart Parking Value Pricing Pilot Project on the COASTER commuter rail line in San Diego (CA, USA), which builds on transit-based smart parking field test research conducted at the Rockridge San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit station. This paper begins with a comprehensive review of the literature on the options and applications of advanced parking technology and management measures available to optimize parking resources at both transit and non-transit facilities. Next, the results of an initial feasibility study for the pilot are described, which include an evaluation of the parking challenges at all six COASTER stations based on an analysis of ridership trends, observed station parking demand, and focus groups with COASTER commuters. Finally, the phased smart parking implementation plan, carefully tailored to address key transit-related parking problems at the station and corridor levels, is described along with the pilot project’s evaluation criteria.