Arlington County, Virginia, is well into the first year of a three-year smart parking pilot that relies on LoRaWAN connections to nearly 4,500 sensors embedded in the pavement at metered parking spaces. The project is being funded with a $5.4 million grant from the state and is considered one of the largest so-called “performance” parking pilots in the nation.
The pavement sensors detect the presence of a vehicle magnetically and via radar, but the system also relies on machine learning in the cloud to verify vehicle presence, engineers working on the pilot told reporters and parking officials from other cities on a short tour on Tuesday along a busy commercial strip just a few blocks from the new Amazon headquarters in Crystal City.
From the in-ground sensors, data is passed to LoRaWAN gateways attached to streetlight poles and from there the data travels to remote servers in the cloud. With the vehicle data, software is used to find empty or full parking spaces along streets and in parking lots. That information is presented nearly in real-time to an app that drivers can soon download to their smartphones.
The county government has commissioned the project to improve the parking experience and make it easier to find spaces to park and to eliminate double parking in busy locales, among other objectives. The system is designed to combine vehicle occupancy technology with pricing tools. Eventually, prices for the busiest parking areas could go up, adjusted quarterly, while prices could go down for less popular parking areas, taking advantage of underused spaces and theoretically lessening the demand on the county to expand parking facilities, according to Ryan Hickey, co-founder of Eleven-X, a Canadian firm that provides the sensors and network architecture in the pilot. The company already provides similar services to other US locales.
The county’s goals explicitly state that the county hopes to see more people choose to park on blocks where demand is low today. The county also says it is not expecting to increase overall parking revenue or increase all metered parking rates across the board. A concern of some residents at early community meetings was whether the county was instituting a dynamic or fast-changing metered parking system, which some residents said they feared because of their experiences with using dynamic pricing on busy interstate highways in the Washington area. But the county says it is not creating dynamic pricing or fast changing metered pricing.
During the short tour, Hickey said LoRaWAN is ideal for the project because it works well with battery-powered devices that are not required to perform in an always-on state. When a vehicle activates a sensor, it begins drawing power to gather and send data, giving the patented Eleven-X sensors 10 years of battery life to lessen maintenance needs.
With the data showing the total of occupied spaces in a given lot or block, Eleven-X or the county can compare the occupancy percentage with the percentage of paid users, he said. If the percentage is low-enough, the county could decide to send parking enforcement officials to a lot or block to use its separate meter payment system to find which vehicles have paid.
The Eleven-X system keeps data private, sending only a simple integer to the cloud to indicate a vehicle is present at a set time. There are no cameras to identify license plates or persons. “We don’t identify vehicles or persons,” he said.
The last two years of the pilot will allow the county to test how pricing affects demand for low-use or high-use parking areas, he said. The first pricing adjustments to meters could come as early as February after the elected county board approves any changes. At that point, smartphone apps with mapping information would become available, Hickey said.