We have continued to work this past week to understand parking and the larger transportation infrastructure in Atlanta. As a refresher, our project centers on helping the City of Atlanta understand and analyze its parking data so that parking resources can most efficiently be used for the benefit of citizens and the City. Most importantly, we have spent the week working with our partners to get a better sense of their needs and concerns.
Something we are quickly coming to learn is that politics play a role in how we are able to access data. Just this Monday, Mayor Kasim Reed announced that the City will not be renewing its contract with PARKAtlanta and instead will put the contract out to bid next month. This has directly impacted our project, as the City must get the meter utilization and citation data from PARKAtlanta before it can pass it along to us. PARKAtlanta has not yet made the transfer. The data we expect to receive should be five years worth of:
- citations – including location, time, and violation
- parking transactions – including location, time, and revenue
- meter utilization
- booting instances
- towing instances
- meter maintenance
In the meantime, we have also met with experts from the Atlanta Regional Commission, Atlanta Bicycle Coalition, and City Hall to hear from them and discuss ideas of how public and pedestrian transit can be incorporated into the project. As the political climate around parking continues to adapt, we will continue to adapt the project so that we can best serve the citizens and the City of Atalanta.
