Finding a space might get easier
The public now can access all of the city’s parking data
Why can’t you just ask Alexa where the open parking spaces are?
It gets a little old to show up to a friend’s house only to drive in circles looking for a parking spot.
Although the technology to enable a voice assistant to find you a space isn’t there yet, a new database can help you prepare for your next trip to Lawrenceville, the South Side or any other tight neighborhood.
The Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center — a joint open- data project among the city, Allegheny County and University of Pittsburgh — is making city parking data publicly available.
There are over 4.3 million transaction entries to comb through.
This isn’t the center’s first project. Since 2015, it has been making all kinds of local data accessible under the Bob Gradeck, project director at the center, which is housed in Oakland on Pitt’s campus.
With so much data, though, it can be overwhelming for the average person to make sense of the transactions.
“To solve these challenges for the city, we have to pull in a lot of really complicated data,” Mr. Gradeck said. He pulled up the homepage for the data center, where a huge table of transactions is listed.
“People need tools and services to be able to use data,” he said.
Empowering citizens
That comes to life through some of the center’s earlier work, which has been used to create web apps. Some were built by the center’s team, some by the city and others by community members interested in open data and web development.
Burgh’s Eye View, for example, is a city map application that lets users drill into crime, property and 311 data by clicking on a given intersection.
The app was built within the city’s Department of Innovation and Performance. To make the parking data more accessible, any developer can access this data and build an app that lets users click and learn.
Created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, the SmellPGH app lets users report and track strange odors around the city.
Parking data offers the same flexibility to developers.
Since the data center receives new parking information from the city every 10 minutes — detailing transactions at parking kiosks and on the mobile payment app — a developer could create a near real- time picture of what city parking looks like.
“Thanks to the partnership between Pitt and the City of Pittsburgh, all types of users can take problem solving into their own hands,” Tara Matthews, senior digital services analyst with the city’s Department of Innovation and Performance, said in a statement. “The resources on the WPRDC can empower them to make data- informed decisions about the factors that affect their quality of life.”
Which lots generate revenue?
The city, itself, uses the center’s tools and datasets.
For example, an idea of what revenue generation looks like for each surface lot would be attractive to the city for planning purposes and budgeting.
To find out how much revenue has been generated from the South Side parking lot at the intersection of 18th and Sidney streets throughout the summer, for example, users can select all dates between June 21 and July 9 of this year.
A bar chart is then generated that shows how many transactions were completed and how much money was made during that period. Below, there is a breakdown by hour.
The findings? So far this summer, the 18th and Sidney lot has generated about $ 4,905 across
2,260 transactions. The majority of payments were made after 6 p. m. and the average projected utilization of the lot is estimated to be about 61%.
Mr. Gradeck said one goal for this project is to help the city best use its paid parking spots based on demand.
So if the city wanted to keep all lots at about 50% utilization as often as possible — perhaps as an incentive to keep people from driving under some carbon emissions plan — the parking authority would want to raise the price of the 18th and Sidney lot to lower demand. A lot operating at about 40% over the same period, though, may see a price decrease.
This tool could also be useful for citizens, Mr. Gradeck pointed out. If a parking lot or street is particularly popular, a business owner may decide a given area is attractive for advertising or setting up a brickandmortar shop.
The open data movement
Pittsburgh seems to be among the leaders of the pack in the municipal open data movement.
That’s according to a 201819 survey from the U. S. City Open Data Census. It’s run by the Sunlight Foundation in Washington, D. C. and Open Knowledge International, a nonprofit in Cambridge, England that promotes and shares data at no charge.
The survey breaks down open data into categories like restaurant inspections, crime reports and police use- of- force and then notes whether or not a city provides that data on a public portal or not. Based on the final tally for these topics, each city is assigned a percent score out of 100, with 100 being complete public information.
Pittsburgh received a score of 73%, ranking it near the top of the list. Missing data categories include business listings, emergency calls and website analytics. Areas that the city does cover, but not completely, include police use- of- force, lobbyist activity and spending, among others.
Ten cities scored higher than Pittsburgh, including Cincinnati and Las Vegas, with 99% each; Los Angeles, with 89%; and Buffalo, N. Y., and San Francisco, with 85% each.
Mr. Gradeck points out that cities and counties might not necessarily be against sharing open data. They may just lack the resources and skills.
“A lot of times it’s not so much that organizations don’t want to share data,” he said. “It’s that they lack the capacity to pull it together, transform it and build a tool.”
He recalls the stress of first receiving parking data from the Parking Authority more than a year ago.
“It was big, way more data than you could ever open in a spreadsheet,” Mr. Gradeck said. “It didn’t happen overnight.”