On-street parking availaibilty data in San Francisco, from stationary sensors and high-mileage probe vehicles

Abstract

This dataset contains records of the measured on-street parking availability in San Francisco, obtained from the public API of the SFpark project. 1 In 2011, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) started a project on smart parking, called SFpark , whose goal was the improvement of on-street parking management in San Francisco, mostly by means of demand-responsive price adjustments [1]. One of the key points of the project was the collection of information about on-street parking availability. To this aim, about 8,000 parking spaces were equipped with specific sensors in the asphalt, periodically broadcasting availability information. The SFpark project made available a public REST API, returning the number of free parking spaces and total number of provided parking spaces per road segment, for 5,314 parking spaces on 579 road segments in the pilot area. We collected parking availability data from 2013/06/13 until 2013/07/24, by querying this API at approximately 5-min intervals. As a result, we obtained in total about 7 million observations of parking availability on the road segments. These observations represent the first dataset we are providing. In addition, we simulated the achievable sensing coverage of on-street parking availability that could be achieved by a fleet of taxis, if they were equipped with sensors able to detect free parking spaces, like side-scanning ultrasonic sensors [3] , or windshield-mounted cameras [4] . In particular, by exploiting real taxi trajectories in San Francisco from the Cabspotting project [5] , we first computed the frequencies of taxi visits for each road segment covered by the SFpark sensors. Then, we downsampled the first dataset, in order to have a parking availability information for a road segment at a given time only in presence of a transit of a taxi on that segment at that time. This step was replicated for 5 different sizes of taxi fleets, namely 100, 200, 300, 400, and 486. Consequently, in total six datasets are available for further research in the field of on-street parking dynamics. All these datasets can be downloaded at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/YLWCSU 10.7910/DVN/YLWCSU .

Driver Side and Traffic Based Evaluation Model for On-Street Parking Solutions

“…Bock et al [13] simulate the sensing coverage of on-street parking by down-sampling the parking data from SFpark. They assume that a fleet of taxis equipped with sensors are able to detect free on-street parking spots.…”

Vehicle Parking Security System with Face Recognition Detection Based on Eigenface Algorithm

“…Visible light communication for intelligent transportation systems: An overview of the latest technologies researched by Shaaban [17]. On-street parking availability data in San Francisco, from stationary sensors and high-mileage vehicle probes were studied by Bock [18]. Incentive Parking Design in Regions -Conception, Technology and Pricing Policy researched by Hanzl [19] Cluster analysis of parking behavior: A case study in Munich researched by Gomari [20].…”