Smart Parking Best Practices for Cities: Continuous Measurement and Management
Updated: Oct 15
Parking can stir up surprisingly heated debate. Ask seven people about parking in their community and you'll likely hear seven different answers.
Those answers usually aren't about parking itself. They reflect what each stakeholder needs:
Merchants: consistently available and convenient access for their customers
Visitors: affordable parking that's easy to find and close to where they're going
Downtown employees: affordable parking for the full workday
Delivery drivers: safe and legal places to load and unload that are available when they arrive
Residents: access to spaces near their homes, without subsidizing everyone else's parking through their taxes
Enforcement staff: clear rules they can apply consistently
City leaders: economic vitality, safety and a system that funds its own upkeep
Those needs collide, and people often disagree about what's actually taking place in their community. One merchant insists there's never anywhere to park; another sees empty spaces every time they drive by. A visitor says there was no parking, when the spaces were simply a block or two farther than they wanted to walk. Opinions about the solutions pull in opposite directions too. One merchant says customers can't find a space because employees and other long-term parkers sit all day and nobody enforces the limits. Another says enforcement is driving customers away. A third blames paid parking. Visitors want parking that's free and close, and rarely think about what it costs to maintain. Taxpayers don't want parking to cost much, but know they'll pay for it if no one else does.
Parking isn't really about parking. It's about managing a shared resource across several different stakeholder types with competing needs fairly and developing a system to sustainably fund its upkeep.
How can cities do this on a sustainable basis? Let objective data be your guide.
The playbook at a glance
Modern parking best practices follow a repeatable cycle:
Agree on shared objectives: what parking should accomplish for everyone it serves.
Set benchmarks: measurable targets that show whether those objectives are being met.
Measure continuously, across the whole system: occupancy, duration, turnover, and rule compliance, so you see the complete picture, not a snapshot.
Let the data mediate: give every stakeholder the same facts to work from.
Manage, adjust and repeat: Stakeholder needs and habits continuously change. Change rules deliberately, enforce them, and measure the results. Build new supply only when the data shows it's needed.
Help people find the parking you already have: real-time information that spreads demand across your system and makes the most of every space.
Objective data runs through every step. Here's why that matters, and how each step works.
Why objective data matters
For city leaders, parking decisions carry real consequences. Build a garage you didn't need, and taxpayers carry the cost for decades. Tighten time limits or add paid parking without understanding demand or stakehold sentiment, and businesses may feel the impact while relationships and trust take years to rebuild. Change nothing, and the same complaints come back louder.
Too often, those decisions rest on the loudest complaint, a handful of anecdotes, or a study that's years old. When the outcome disappoints, there's little to explain why the decision was made, and little to show whether the problem was the rule, the enforcement or something else entirely.
Objective, continuous data changes that. It gives leaders a clear record of what was happening before a decision, why the decision was made, and what happened after. That's what makes a decision defensible to merchants, residents, council and the public.
Step 1: Start with shared objectives
Before debating solutions, agree on what parking should accomplish. City staff should first align internally, then gather input from the people your parking serves: merchants, visitors, employees, delivery operators and residents. Their priorities will differ, but most communities share a core set of objectives:
Access to businesses. Customers can reach the goods and services they want, merchants can run profitable businesses, delivery companies can load and unload efficiently and safely, and the city benefits from a thriving tax base.
Access for residents. Residents can park near their homes, protected from spillover, without bearing a disproportionate share of the cost.
The right spaces in the right places. Short-term spaces close to high-demand areas for customers, cheaper or longer time-limited parking for employees a bit farther out, and appropriate space for loading, ADA and EV parking. That keeps prime spaces open for customers while helping businesses retain staff.
Safety. Less circling, less double parking, and clear hydrants, bus stops and crosswalks.
Parking that's easy to find and use. Clear information, signage and wayfinding, so people know where to go before they arrive.
Responsible stewardship. Making the most of existing parking before building more, with a sustainable way to fund and maintain it.
Clear, enforceable rules. A transparent set of rules everyone understands, which gives staff a consistent basis for enforcement and gives everyone a basis for measuring results.
The goal isn't to make everyone agree on every priority. It's to make decisions everyone can understand, measured against objectives everyone has seen.
Step 2: Measure progress with Donald Shoup's benchmark
Objectives describe what you want parking to accomplish. To know whether you're getting there, you need a way to measure it.
Donald Shoup, the UCLA urban planning professor who died in 2025, is widely regarded as the father of modern parking policy, and his work remains the foundation of parking best practices today. His books The High Cost of Free Parking (2005) and Parking and the City (2018) changed how cities think about the curb.
One of Shoup's most useful contributions is a simple benchmark: manage spaces so that roughly 85% are occupied at peak times, leaving about one open space per block. It's not a goal in itself; it's a signal of whether your objectives are being met. When blocks are consistently full, drivers circle, delivery drivers double-park, safety suffers and some people decide not to come at all. When blocks sit mostly empty, valuable curb space and the investment behind it go underused.
Programs set their benchmarks a little differently. San Francisco's SFpark aimed for 60 to 80% occupancy, and Washington, D.C.'s parkDC pilot aimed for 70 to 90%. What matters is that everyone measures against the same target, rather than arguing about whether parking feels full.
Occupancy isn't the only benchmark worth setting. Cities also track how long vehicles stay against posted time limits, how often spaces turn over, and how well rules are followed. Together, these show not just whether parking is full, but whether it's working the way your rules intend.
Step 3: Measure continuously, across the whole system
A target only helps if you can measure against it accurately and often.
Know what you're measuring. Four measures tell most of the story: occupancy (how full spaces are, by hour and day), duration (how long vehicles stay), turnover (how many vehicles use a space in a day) and compliance (how often time limits, paid parking rules, and other rules are followed).
Measure your whole public inventory, not just the problem blocks. Most communities have several kinds of parking: on-street spaces, loading zones, public lots, garages and sometimes leased or shared lots. Drivers experience them as one system. Complaints may come from a few busy blocks, but the answer often lies in the lots and streets nearby. Measuring only the problem area hides whether demand is spilling over, whether a nearby lot sits half empty, or whether a rule change simply moved the problem somewhere else.
Measure continuously, not once a decade. Many cities make major parking decisions based on a study done every several years, built on a few days of counts. A snapshot can't show how demand shifts with seasons, events, new businesses and changing habits, or how drivers respond when a rule changes. Continuous data shows what's actually happening every hour of every day. Ideally, measure through a full year so seasonal patterns are clear.
Step 4: Let the data mediate
When everyone works from the same continuous data, the conversation changes. The question is no longer whose experience is right. It's what the data shows: which blocks reach the target, when, how long cars typically stay, how often rules are followed, and where spaces sit empty. Patterns like cars occupying prime spaces all day often point to who is parking there, even when the data doesn't identify anyone.
Data doesn't make decisions for you. City leaders still weigh priorities and tradeoffs. But it turns competing opinions into a shared starting point, makes decisions easier to explain, and shows the results of each change.
Step 5: Manage, adjust and repeat
With continuous data, parking becomes something you manage over time, not something you set once and revisit years later when the same complaints return. Work through changes in a deliberate order, so you know what each one accomplished.
1. Find where occupancy is consistently above target. Look for areas that regularly exceed your benchmark at peak times, not just on an occasional busy day.
2. Set time limits, and enforce them. A time limit can open up spaces by encouraging turnover, but only if it's enforced. Compliance data tells you which is happening: if most vehicles follow the limit and blocks are still full, the rule may need to change; if many overstay, the problem is enforcement, not the rule. Tightening a rule that isn't being enforced won't fix anything.
3. Adjust step by step. Change gradually, for example from four hours to three, then two, and watch the effect before changing again. Where long-term parkers like employees are crowding out customers, consider directing them to underused lots with permits rather than tightening limits for everyone. Continuous data shows results within weeks rather than waiting years for the next study.
4. If time limits aren't enough, choose deliberately. When an area still runs consistently over target after time limits are optimized and enforced, leaders face a real choice, with tradeoffs on each side:
Accept higher occupancy and keep parking free. In car-dependent areas with limited transit, many successful districts operate above 85% as long as spaces still turn over and the area is thriving.
Introduce paid parking. Shoup argued for demand-based pricing to keep occupancy on target. Communities considering it should weigh how drivers in their market are likely to respond, and how businesses and visitors will perceive the change.
Add supply. Leased lots, shared-use agreements with private owners, valet consolidation or new construction can add capacity.
No single answer is right for every community. The point is to make the choice with current evidence, after the less costly steps have been tried, and to be able to show why.
Step 6: Help people find the parking you already have
Better rules only go so far if drivers don't know where to go. Most people don't just need to know other parking exists; they need confidence they'll find a space when they get there, and directions to it.
Real-time availability gives drivers that confidence. When someone can see that a lot two blocks away has open spaces, they're far more likely to go there than to circle the busiest block. It's one of the most direct ways to spread demand across your whole system without changing a single rule.
Where Fybr fits
Fybr provides continuous, space-level occupancy data from in-ground sensors, along with the guidance, enforcement and analytics tools that help cities act on it. We've seen this approach work in cities large and small, from San Francisco and Washington, D.C., to Glens Falls, New York and Dublin, Ohio.