Visualizing seasonal parking demand

The City of Aspen regularly triples its population as visitors flood in on vacation. Especially in the summer, these visitors come with cars. Because the number of parking spaces doesn’t triple seasonally, every on-street parking space fills up and parkers circle looking for an empty space, causing terrible traffic congestion and frustrated drivers.

Mitch Osur, the Director of Parking at the City of Aspen and his team are working with Smarking to quantify just how volatile these seasonal swings are. The chart below shows the peak number of vehicles parked every day in 2015 (note gaps on Sundays when there is no paid parking and holidays such as July 4th).

Daily peak payment occupancy from January 1 — December 31, 2015. Note that mobile payments and service vehicles (purple and orange lines) fluctuate seasonally much less, while metered payments (teal line) are more seasonal. This is likely due to more local and employee use of these payment types.

This fluctuation is CRAZY! And while these seasonal shifts are more extreme than most, it is not just a characteristic of vacation destinations. I have the privilege of working with dozens of cities in the US, small and large, many of whom have some sort of parking management problem due to seasonal fluctuations in parking demand: student populations, sport event calendars, and other destination cities (think beachfront) all cause seasonal variance in parking demand.

How is Aspen managing this?

Aspen has extremely innovative parking management policies: they have increased rates during their peak season in the summer and they have graduated pricing after the first hour - a second hour is priced higher than the first in order to encourage turnover (for more on this read about the City of Santa Cruz); a third or fourth hour is even higher.

Aspen is using Smarking data to tackle users who find ways around paying full price for their parking. One of these is mobile payment abuse. Mobile payments make it easy to re-start a new parking session every hour rather than pay for the more expensive additional hours. In every other city I’ve worked with, average transaction price for mobile payments is much higher than meter payments; in Aspen, average mobile payment transactions are only 68% of meter payment transactions (see figure below). Something smells fishy.

Aspen also re-evaluating their special price of $0.50/hour and no time limits for service vehicles (think construction and other utility vehicles). Allowing all-day parking for such a low price has an exorbitant impact on space utilization: due 8–9 hour stays, the impact from services vehicles is three times greater than a typical parker. In raw numbers we see 1.9% of vehicles are taking up 5.9% of spaces during the peak period.

In the chart below, you’ll see that meter users pay more to park on average, relative to mobile users and service vehicles, negating some of the impact of Aspen’s innovative pricing policies. Because, on average, a third of total parking spaces are occupied by mobile users and service vehicles, these users have a meaningful impact on the city’s efforts to make parking available to visitors during the peak season.

Average payment for a single paid parking transaction from January 2015 — April 2016 broken down by payment type.

How the hotel industry manages seasonal demand

I searched online for a hotel in Aspen during the first weekend in August. The rate at the Limelight in downtown Aspen is $501 per night. In November, the rate for the same room is $170 per night.

I plotted monthly peak parking occupancy in Aspen against the average price of a hotel room in Aspen. The similarity is truly amazing:

Monthly peak paid occupancy compared to daily hotel price searches. Hotels were searched for Thursday-Sunday stays in the middle of each month.

The hotel industry has perfected demand-based pricing. There is a limited and relatively fixed supply of hotel rooms and fluctuating seasonal demand. To accommodate for this imbalance, hotels manipulate the price of their inventory, maximizing their revenues and managing supply.

Wrap-up: how to deal with seasonality

Aspen is head and shoulders above most cities because they already adjust prices seasonally: parking rates increase in the summer during peak demand and they have a graduated pricing structure. The need for this type of policy is clearly validated by Smarking’s occupancy over time chart. However, peak occupancy is at 100%, meaning that vehicles are circling for parking, increasing both vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and stress levels; this is bad for the environment and visitor experience. Fortunately, due to active and progressive parking policies, they’ve identified ways to continue working on improving parking management and making both driving and parking in the area more clean and less stressful.

Location based pricing? Time of day (dynamic) pricing? Seasonal pricing? These are exciting times in the parking industry — stay tuned to the Smarking blog for more updates!