New website leads visitors and residents to parking options

By Hutton Marshall

The hunt for parking is a familiar practice for any car-owning San Diegan. Some in fact, may still be recuperating from trying to find a spot in the Gaslamp Quarter during Comic Con.

Much of this auto overload occurs in San Diego’s dense urban core — the Downtown neighborhoods — and the nonprofit Civic San Diego is more familiar with the problem than most.

Responsible for managing community-based parking solutions Downtown, CivicSD has advocated for increased public transit and smarter city parking policies, and it also owns and manages two garages in East Village and the Gaslamp Quarter. Now, the urban-development organization is making the most of the resources it’s already helped create — it wants to make sure the area’s parking can actually be found.

The solution is a website, ParkItDTSD.com.

Built to adapt to any device (e.g. smartphones, tablets, computers), the site allows users to search for the nearest parking garage by location, neighborhood or landmark. The site doesn’t incorporate free options yet, but the app allows users to filter by price as well and CivicSD’s two garages are only $1 per hour.

Though this website will be new to Downtown, the idea has proved worthwhile elsewhere. Stephanie Shooks, CivicSD’s program manager for ParkItDTSD, said the idea for the site came from a smartphone app developed by the Uptown Community Parking District (UCPD) called Park Hillcrest.

Despite being less populated than Downtown, Hillcrest’s high visitor rate and proximity to Downtown and North Park make it a natural epicenter for Uptown’s parking challenges. The UCPD app tracks each metered spot in the neighborhood, as well as the Park Hillcrest Trolley, which ferries people around the neighborhood free of charge.

“Using GPS technology, users can be in a store, a restaurant or at one of our parking facilities and see exactly where the trolley is on its route in order to hop on,” said Elizabeth Hannon, UCPD’s chief operating officer. “[Park Hillcrest] helps alleviate impacted parking conditions as users can park once — whether it is for work or play — and hop on board for free rides throughout the business district.”

The Park Hillcrest app has evolved over several different phases, each adding additional functionality. The UCPD will soon launch a new streamlined service, Access Hillcrest, to provide additional parking information and services.

With this model in mind, CivicSD sent out a request for proposal to produce an app that would include real-time parking information, searchable map functions and general information about the parking district. CivicSD received 14 proposals, but ultimately went with the Los Angeles-based Civic Research Group International (CRGI).

“They have a proven track record merging technology with the public sector,” Shook said. “We knew this app would be data heavy, especially if we wanted to include real-time data.”

Although CivicSD had a previously established concept, CRGI founder and CEO Gregory C. Curtin said the Downtown app wasn’t modeled off any existing parking applications. He said its inception was more organic.

“The real inspiration for ParkItDTSD was San Diego’s own desire to build a mobile and web foundation for creating a truly ‘connected’ Downtown — a ‘smart’ city that connects parking, transportation and getting around, events, local business, tourism, arts and culture, etc.,” Curtin said.

The app now includes 75 percent of all Downtown lots and garages, according to Shook, including CivicSD’s two garages.

Many ambitious improvements upon the framework of the app are on the way, too. The first update, expected next summer, is to show real-time garage capacity. That is, how full the garages are at any given time.

CivicSD’s two garages already do this, Shook said, and now the nonprofit is working with the other garages included in the app to help them install the same technology, which simply counts and reports cars coming and going from the garage.

Synchronizing this large amount of data is no easy task though, said Curtin.

“The various parking providers employ a wide range of disparate data and information systems to manage their parking facilities — these different systems don’t ‘talk’ to each other,” Curtin said. “To their credit, the various public and private providers involved in the ParkItDTSD implementation collaborated wonderfully and provided access to their data and information so that it could all be brought together.”

Other updates to come in the future are more complex. Last year, San Diego replaced approximately 200 traditional, coin-operated parking meters Downtown with “smart meters.” The new, electronic meters allow drivers to pay with credit card, and, more importantly, they allow for remote monitoring. This makes meter parking more easily policed, but it also allows policymakers to gather data from the meters to study Downtown parking trends.

Shook said she hopes to integrate this monitoring capability into the app, to show what metered spots are available. As smart meters are expected to become a more common sighting in San Diego, this would significantly increase the amount of parking spots available to the app’s users.

Another interesting idea they are looking at — which would require much deeper integration with privately owned lots — is the creation of an online payment portal, where users can go to the site, find a spot, pay for it remotely through the website, and then drive there to park. This would also provide another route of self-supporting revenue for the site, Shook said. CivicSD also plans to launch a free trolley similar to the one in Hillcrest and monitor it in real time on the map feature as well.

“The challenge of creating a real-time parking application is ensuring that it fits into this bigger mobility and connectivity picture, rather than serving simply as a standalone parking app that doesn’t connect to anything or further the city ‘experience,’” Curtis said.

Important to the app’s basic functions and any tools embedded on top of that, Shook said, is the primary goal to serve a wide demographic: both residents and visitors to the Downtown neighborhoods.

“Say if you live outside of Downtown, you may think there is no parking, so this will help demystify those reservations,” Shook said. “But also if you work, live or are familiar with Downtown, this may open up some new options for you too.”

To use the website for yourself, visit ParkItDTSD.com to get started.

—Contact Hutton Marshall at [email protected].