Parking price rises fail to cut demand, study finds

SenSen and Turnstone have published an analysis of parking data from more than 60 US cities, finding that higher parking prices did not consistently reduce the number of vehicles parked.

The companies examined cities that had made at least five parking rate changes over several years and compared those shifts with vehicle volumes at the curb. In one neighbourhood, hourly rates moved between USD $2 and USD $3 while the number of parked vehicles stayed flat or increased.

The finding challenges a long-held assumption in urban parking policy: that raising prices will curb demand. Instead, the data suggests pricing may affect how long motorists stay rather than whether they choose to park at all.

The work stems from a North American partnership between SenSen, which uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to monitor street activity, and Turnstone, which analyses parking inventory and behaviour data. Together, they aim to give municipal authorities a fuller picture of parking demand, compliance, turnover and curb use.

Many local authorities still rely on fragmented systems built for payment collection or ticketing rather than for measuring how streets are actually used. Parking information often sits across meter systems, GIS databases, permits, payment apps, citation platforms and spreadsheets, making it difficult for cities to answer basic operational questions.

One is how many usable parking spaces exist on a given day. The companies estimate that manual inventories in a mid-sized city can cost between USD $50,000 and USD $100,000 and may already be out of date by the time they are finished.

In one city they examined, only 178 single-space meters could be counted easily, despite about 23,000 parking spaces spread across metered, multi-space and unmetered areas. The mismatch illustrates the challenge for officials trying to plan pricing, enforcement and street use with incomplete records.

SenSen uses patrol vehicles already deployed for automated parking enforcement to capture street-level information as they travel their normal routes. Its system can identify and geolocate signs, meters, pay stations, curb cuts, fire hydrants, bike racks and other objects that affect curb space, while also identifying vehicles and the parking rules that apply to them.

That data is then fed into Turnstone's analytics platform and combined with information from payment systems, meters, licence plate recognition tools, and parking access and revenue control systems. The goal is to replace multiple disconnected databases with a current map of curb conditions and parking activity.

For the companies, the pricing analysis is only one example of what can emerge when cities compare street-level observations with the assumptions embedded in parking policy. As roads become more crowded and curb space faces competing demands from ride-hailing services, delivery vehicles, outdoor dining, bike lanes, electric vehicle charging and micromobility, the quality of the data behind those decisions becomes more important.

Dr. Subhash Challa, Chief Executive Officer of SenSen, said the broader issue is that municipal parking teams have often had to manage the curb without a direct view of what is happening there. "Cities have spent years trying to manage the curb with incomplete information," he said.

He added: "The surprising thing when you start measuring what is actually happening isn't simply that you get better data. You discover that some things everybody assumed were true may not be true at all."

Data gaps

The approach has already exposed errors that were not visible in conventional parking systems. In one city, 40 parking meters appeared in the database to sit within the same six-foot stretch of pavement.

The problem was not with the meters themselves but with the recorded coordinates. They were assigned a location when configured at a depot and kept those coordinates after installation across the city, with the error becoming apparent only once the assets were mapped.

"This is the difference between having transactions and actually understanding the curb," Challa said.

He added: "A city can process 20,000 parking transactions every day and still not see that 40 meters are supposedly sitting on top of each other. AI allows us to connect what the systems say is happening with what is physically happening on the street."

James Barr, Co-Founder of Turnstone, linked the findings to broader pressures on urban transport systems. "As cities grow denser, curb space is more valuable than ever... Without clear insights, congestion worsens, revenue is lost, and mobility suffers," Barr said.

The same data loop has also produced operational changes in enforcement, according to the companies. One SenSen customer reported a 50% increase in citations after switching from operator-directed licence plate recognition to automated detection, which the company attributed to broader enforcement coverage rather than any change in rules.

Other examples cited by the companies included a 10.2% citywide reduction in non-compliance after patrols were allocated using data, the discovery of a neighbourhood where non-compliance was 30% or higher, and the identification of more than 500 poorly used parking machines. These cases suggest the system's value may lie as much in revealing hidden operational patterns as in testing economic assumptions about pricing.

For city officials, the core issue is that the curb is no longer a simple parking asset. It is a contested part of public space, and decisions on pricing, enforcement and allocation increasingly require evidence drawn from the street itself rather than from isolated administrative systems.

"The curb may be one of the most valuable pieces of public real estate a city owns, yet remarkably often it is managed on ballpark estimates," Challa said.

He added: "AI changes that. Every patrol can become a measurement of the city. Combine that with the analytics to understand what the data is telling you, and cities can start asking much better questions about pricing, enforcement, congestion and ultimately how that public space should be used."