It happens all the time. You’re at an intersection. The light’s green but the traffic ahead is stopped. You have a choice: Stay where you are or go forward, and just hope the traffic in front of you moves before the light changes.
Drivers in Boston often take the chance and move ahead, sometimes leaving them stuck in the middle of the intersection after the light changes, blocking cars and causing gridlock. Kenny Jervis has seen it a thousand times, and increasingly, a collection of distributed, networked, sensor-laden devices —everyone's smartphones — is also taking note, and feeding data to City Hall.
Jervis grew up in and lives in South Boston, and now criss-crosses the city to shuttle his kids between school and activities. Jervis says in his experience, blocking intersections is just one aspect of Boston driving behavior that causes traffic jams.
"The habits are just so ingrained," he said. "It shows in my neighborhood, on Broadway, just the freewheeling ability that people have to double park, like it’s their right."
Boston’s culture of, let’s say … assertive driving and parking is trackable now, with information streaming in from mobile phones, the ParkBoston app, and other navigation apps, like Waze, that have agreed to hand over data to the city. A group of data analysts, technologists, and business consultants — including Boston's Chief Information Officer, Jascha Franklin-Hodge — is crunching those numbers for the city.
Wait A Minute …
The ParkBoston app is off to a good start. Since being launched in January, it’s now used more than 8,000 times a day. There have been more than 130,000 downloads of the app. The average number of transactions per day in July was 3,361; in August, 4,665; September 6,054. A one-day high of 8,571 transactions was reached on October 8. That means there’s lots of information being captured — everything from where people park to how they move around the city. That new influx of data could help improve the flow of traffic, and, possibly, open up a world of possibilities when it comes to enforcement.
"We’re looking at these tools, and in some cases there’s an enforcement piece of that, but ultimately this is about planning a city that works for everybody, and as we grow, making sure we’re not subjecting ourselves to endlessly increasing congestion and challenges getting from work and to school,” Franklin-Hodge said.
Franklin-Hodge’s dream is to get traffic moving faster by creating a way for smartphones to help people find parking spaces.
"You can imagine a future nav app that is informed by info from the city, saying, ‘OK, if you’re going to drive there, here’s the best way to get there and here’s the best place to park,’" he said. "Suddenly people are spending less time circling the block parking. It might also be an opportunity for the app to say, 'Hey, you’re going to save yourself 20 minutes if you take the train.'"
The city is taking the first step toward that future by building a new app that explains restrictions on specific parking spaces — in other words, where you can and can’t park.
"Right now you have to sort of decipher the signage and decide whether you fit in those rules or not in those rules," said Chris Carter, an urban planner with the city's department of innovation, known as the Office of New Urban Mechanics. "We'd like to be able to communicate that to the public."
That's the kind of thing the city's focusing on with all this new technology and information, says Boston Chief of Streets Chris Osgood — increasing convenience for Boston drivers — not handing out more parking tickets. For example, enforcement officers don’t stand at the end of a block, look at a device, and see which ParkBoston sessions are about to expire nearby, so they can be there to slip an orange ticket under a windshield wiper.
"The short of it is we are not using the ParkBoston app to do targeted enforcement," Osgood said. "Instead we have parking enforcement officers who are out throughout the city who are in general looking for people who have not paid their meter."
But just because they haven't done it yet, doesn't mean they won't do it in the future. Boston Transportation Commissioner Gina Fiandaca isn’t ruling out using information from the ParkBoston app to plan where and when to send parking enforcement officers.
"Certainly the data that’s collected through the apps is invaluable and will help inform our deployment strategies and route structures," Fiandaca said.
So far Boston is taking a hands-off approach when it comes to parking tickets. But the city is using data from other apps to hand out other kinds of tickets. User data from a navigation and traffic app called Waze is helping Boston deploy enforcement officers on bikes — in real time — to ticket double parkers.
Information from the Waze app also is helping the city learn how to deal with the blocked intersection problem. Does it make sense to send traffic enforcement to ticket drivers, or does ticketing just create more traffic problems? That’s something the city wants to know, because traffic hurts business, says Justin Backal Balik of A Better City, a civic-minded nonprofit whose board members hail from companies like Fidelity Investments.
"It’s really been an issue in a lot of the downtown but also in the Seaport where we’re seeing it’s one of the fastest growing issues in the Commonwealth," Balik said. "So with activity — it’s a good problem to have — but with activity can come traffic congestion.”
Cost/Benefit
Boston makes millions of dollars in parking fines every year, but Eric Bourassa, director of the transportation division for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, says most cities in the region struggle with the cost of parking enforcement and hope technology can reduce those costs.
Last year Boston had 223 people listed as parking supervisors, assistant supervisors, or meter operators. They earned, on average, $48,000 dollars per year, including overtime. In all that’s about $10.6 million. In fiscal 2014 that staff brought in $56 million in parking fines.
"In most cases parking violations do not create revenue for a city," Bourassa said. "What you’re trying to do is just balance out the cost of enforcement."
Cities actually give out tickets, Bourassa says, to encourage turnover and free up parking spaces so more people are able to patronize area businesses — that is something Boston is worried about. Last month Mayor Marty Walsh cited parking turnover and enforcement as reasons he’s exploring increasing the price of meter parking in high-demand areas.
That’s something business leaders support, says Balik.
"The business community and our board and elsewhere throughout the city is really concerned about congestion and programs like this in San Francisco and elsewhere and parts of New York City and L.A. have really been proven to relieve congestion and help turnover so people can access parking in a much more expedited manner," Balik said.
Convenience Rules Everything Around Me
It’s tough to find someone who vocally opposes the city using technology to improve traffic flow and enforcement, partially because it’s all so new.
Jervis uses the ParkBoston app to pay for parking once, maybe twice a day, and he’d be fine with the city using that data to improve its enforcement strategies — he’d just want to know about it.
"Any app you sign into says what they use that data for, and you have the choice to use it or not," he said. "And I would think the ParkBoston app should have that same disclaimer when you download it and start to use it — that your data is being aggregated and tracked."
Knowing that the parking police are closely watching may deter some people from using the app. But Jervis says it’s so convenient he'd keep using it.
