Arlington Launches 'Performance Parking' Pilot Project On 4,500 Spaces

ARLINGTON, VA — Arlington County is conducting a three-year pilot program to gauge the public's experience with changes to metered parking spaces in two commercial and apartment corridors in the county.

One of the primary goals of the pilot program is to see if it will make metered parking spaces more available on a more frequent basis. County officials said a similar pilot project in San Francisco had positive results, improving parking availability in the city.

Officials said Arlington would like to see many of the same positive outcomes with parking that San Francisco experienced with its program, including a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions due to fewer vehicle miles traveled.

The Performance Parking Pilot Project includes about 4,500 metered parking spaces in the Rosslyn-Ballston and Richmond Highway corridors. Most of the parking spaces included in the pilot will be on-street parking.

The pilot will use in-ground sensors to provide real-time occupancy information for each of the parking spaces included in the project area. The sensors can detect the presence or absence of a vehicle, and duration-of-stay can be calculated.

No camera technology will be used, and no personal identifying information will be collected by the system, Arlington County said.

Once initial occupancy data has been gathered, the project team expects applying the pricing tools to the pilot project corridors on a quarterly basis, changing prices up or down across the 4,500 parking spaces included in the pilot to meet the goals of the pilot project.

System design, installation, testing and initial data collection will occur in the first year of the pilot project, while the second and third years will be dedicated to data collection and pricing calibration.

Arlington County’s Master Transportation Plan states that county transportation staff should “utilize parking meter pricing strategies that vary by hour and location to better match parking availability and demand.”

The county’s parking team, part of Arlington’s Transportation Engineering & Operations Bureau, received a $5.4 million grant from the Virginia Department of Transportation’s Innovation and Technology Transportation Fund to install and test technology that would allow staff to make changes to the price of parking across the metered parking network to encourage more efficient use of the system.

According to the county, the project will not seek to increase overall parking revenue, will not increase all metered parking rates across the board, will not decrease the number of reserved ADA-accessible parking spaces, and will not create dynamically or fast-changing metered pricing.

Based on what it learns from the pilot project, Arlington will then decide whether to make the parking changes permanent.