Faster time to park means lower vehicle emissions for this SoCal City

New numbers produced by Frogparking’s data science team show that, in the three years since installing Frogparking’s smart-city parking platform, there was a significant reduction in the time to find a parking space in the City of Laguna Beach. This has meant fewer people are cruising the City streets and parking lots looking for an available parking space because visitors are able to check availability on the app before they start their journey. This has also led to a reduction in vehicle emissions.

So how does it work? See more here: /projects/lagunabeach/

Overview

With over 23,000 permanent residents and nearly 7 million annual visitors, finding a parking space was difficult and people searching for parking created serious congestion issues in the downtown area during the busy summer months. 

To help ease the parking pains, Frogparking delivered a complete smart-city parking platform to the City of Laguna Beach. The platform encompasses a wide range of Frogparking hardware, software, and integrations with existing third-party hardware.

“The App” as it’s known locally, delivers real-time parking availability, payment, and find my car straight to the hands of over 200,000 people who have downloaded the app since going live in June 2019.

The Solution

Frogparking rolled out a complete smart-city parking platform for the City of Laguna Beach. The solution is made up of:

• Over 5,000 of Frogparking’s patented indoor, outdoor, and on-street occupancy sensors,
• Integration with existing, on-street cash payment machines
• Fully branded mobile application for parking payments, an availability map, integration with public transit schedules and services, and find-my-car, 
• Integration with existing citation module,

Conclusions

The City of Laguna Beach has created a fully connected parking ecosystem that delivers end-users of parking an easier, frictionless, and contactless experience.

July 2019*	July 2022*
197,000 42.7 8 2680	218,000 (+ 7.6%) 60.4 (+ 17.63%) 2 (75% faster) 670	total occupancies Utilization of parking spaces minutes to find a parking space** Vehicle Emissions***

*July was chosen as the example as it is one of the busiest months of the year for the City.

**Data collected by Frogparking system. Time to park is based on geo fence and mobile app data from the City.

***calculation is based on the output of the median vehicle emissions scale in California measured in grams of CO2 per mile, combined with the recorded reduction in time to park.

These numbers, collected from the system reporting and dashboard, show that even though there was an overall increase in the number of parking occupancies (197,000 vs 218,000 (+ 7.6%) around the city between the control month (July 2019 – the first month of the project) and the example month (July 2022), time to park reduced significantly (75%) because users were circulating parking lots for less time looking for an available parking space, thanks to parking guidance and displaying live availability on the parking mobile app, meaning vehicles would be emitting less CO2 into the atmosphere.

Time to park reduction can also be attributed to an increase in vehicles parking in lots of the periphery of the City and catching a free trolley bus to the downtown area. This increase is because, for the first time, drivers were able to check the app and see the availability of these periphery lots and then access a live trolley schedule through an integration with the mobile app.