Many maps of where parking has fees

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January's episode of Reinventing Parking introduced six surprising parking reform ideas. 

This post explains the third idea, "Project to create many city maps of areas with paid parking"  [12:00]

This is a lightly edited transcript of that part of the episode, which starts at the 12:00 point.

Listen with the player below. Or subscribe to the audio podcast. This is the official podcast of the Parking Reform Network.

Many city maps of parking pricing

The success of Parking Reform Network’s mapping projects got me thinking. 

So here is another mapping possibility. 

Would it be useful to create a large set of maps of many cities highlighting all the areas in each city that have any paid parking? 

How difficult would it be I wonder? 

I see that various cities around the world do have online maps of where their paid street parking is. Some show garages too. 

https://seattlecitygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=5814e3f6c7054a40a9b4d175dcbf294b

But these maps can be hard to find, and some are difficult to use. 

User-friendly and easily compared maps of paid parking in many cities, please!

So the suggestion here is for a large set of user-friendly maps for many cities which highlight where any paid parking at all exists, whether it’s on-street parking fees or commercial off-street parking or unbundled residential parking or workplace parking fees. 

Would such a set of maps be useful?

I have to admit that I don’t have a strong sense of how useful such maps would be. 

But the maps that I could find online were fascinating! So, I suspect that parking reformers might get a lot from being able to compare the geography of paid parking across many different cities all over the world. 

For example, cities like Austin, Texas and Auckland, New Zealand may seem to have lots of paid parking in and around their central areas. But vast areas – most of their areas – have no paid parking at all. Even a city like Berlin in Germany, has paid on-street parking only in the core area. 

At the other extreme, Singapore, where I live, has paid parking almost everywhere. 

And, in many cities, I think it would be especially interesting to zero in on areas NEAR the priced parking areas. Why? Well, those are likely places where parking issues ALMOST justify pricing. They are places with lots of complaining about parking shortages but where the real problem is almost certainly a lack of parking management. 

Would this be possible? Easy? Difficult? Worthwhile?

Would it be difficult to generate such a set of maps? Would it worthwhile? I don’t know. 

Any volunteers? Maybe Parkopedia would be willing to help?

What do you think? 


Listen to the audio episode here: 


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