Miami Parking Authority Enables 95% Digital Parking Adoption with Data-driven Policy Making
Updated: Dec 16, 2022
The City of Miami uses Smarking’s Business Intelligence Platform to make data-driven decisions to increase mobile payment adoption from 40% to 95%, reduce maintenance and labor costs by more than $3 million dollars, all while creating over $45 million dollars of additional funds for the community.
Background
The Miami Parking Authority (MPA) partnered with Smarking in 2017 to help the city with their initiative of mobile payment adoption enablement. Through this partnership, MPA made data-driven decisions to successfully remove legacy pay stations surgically across the city. The goals were to reduce cost and increase efficiency, ensure parkers have convenient payment options, maintain consistent parking revenue, and maximize the well-being of the community. Given the diversity of neighborhoods and parker payment preferences across the city, the extent and pace of pay station removal needed to vary in different neighborhoods to minimize the disruptions on parkers’ usage and on revenue flow. This process typically requires expensive and time consuming parker payment preference surveys across multiple areas of the city. This is particularly challenging in tourist areas where sampling is more challenging. In addition, phased removal means starting small, testing and monitoring the results, then expanding the scale or making adjustments, all of which create ongoing challenges to parking managers and decision makers. The MPA was able to increase mobile adoption from 40% to 95% over the course of 2017 to 2022.
MPA and Smarking shared an early success story back in 2018 with the broad parking industry . This 2022 case study is an update on the continued success of the MPA “pay station removal program” throughout and post the COVID pandemic.
George Mclean, Senior Business Analyst, Miami Parking Authority “We used Smarking's Business Intelligence SaaS Platform to figure out which pay stations were prime targets for our pay-station-removal program. If it were not for Smarking, we could not have made such accurate data-driven decisions.”
Fig. 1, Before, Pay Station and Mobile Payment Transactions Miami 2017
Fig. 2, After, Pay Station and Mobile Payment Transactions Miami 2021-2022
Miami City-Wide Parking Digitization
Miami as a whole is a large city with varied neighborhoods and varied daily parking patterns. Some areas cater more to tourists, and some areas cater more to locals. Miami created equity-oriented policy, and rolled out their pay station removal program neighborhood by neighborhood, starting with more Technologically driven areas first for example; ( Brickell, Wynwood). As shown in Fig. 1, the City of Miami started at 40% mobile payments and 60% pay station payments by transactions in January 2017. In Fig. 2, by the end of June 2022, the City of Miami reached 95% mobile payment transactions.
In the same time period, the City also observed substantial increase in parking revenue while switching to mobile payment from pay stations. This increase in revenue continued throughout the Covid-19 pandemic in the past years. Fig. 3 shows the pay station, mobile payment and total revenue for 2017. Fig. 4 shows 2021-2022 numbers with the switch to mobile payment over pay station.
This increase in revenue is coupled with the decrease in maintenance costs of removing the pay stations. Very likely, the compliance ratio may have improved significantly over the same period as well.
Wilfredo Soto, Senior Operations & Maintenance Manager, Miami Parking Authority "The reduction of $375,000 in equipment maintenance allowed us to focus our resources on improving city infrastructure."
Fig. 3, Before, Parking Revenue in Miami 2017
