Testing a novel parking system: on-street reservations

Abstract

A good portion of auto congestion in urban downtown areas is caused by people driving around looking for parking spots. We developed a novel parking system that allows people to reserve on-street parking, meant to reduce congestion, increase convenience, and raise revenue. We built prototype parking meters and set them up in our parking lot, where we ran two rounds of usability testing. We asked participants to drive their cars in the parking lot, choose an appropriate spot, and pay the meter. The first round identified a key design issue with the meter, so we came up with three alternative meter designs to address that issue and then compared them in the second round of testing. This video shows how we ran the parking meter testing and the outcome.