Esri has selected Studio Davis’s Seattle Paid Parking Data Dashboard for its official ArcGIS Dashboards Gallery. Developed using Seattle’s public paid-parking records and blockface inventory, the dashboard makes it possible to explore how parking activity varies across the city, throughout the day, and over longer periods.
The dashboard brings those different scales together. Users can examine the daily rhythm of a particular location, compare activity across neighborhoods and time periods, and follow longer-term trends. Where is paid activity consistently high? How does it vary by time of day and place? Which patterns repeat, and where are they changing? These are the questions the dashboard was built to help people explore, rather than reducing a parking system to a single occupancy figure or snapshot.
An important distinction runs through the work: paid activity is not a complete measure of actual parking demand. Payment records cannot, on their own, tell us how many vehicles are parked without payment or why. That makes the relationship between demand and payment behavior an important direction for further investigation. Understanding compliance requires looking at both the activity recorded in the data and the parking activity those records miss.
Pricing adds another dimension. When parking prices change, what happens to demand, payment activity, and compliance? Do the effects vary by neighborhood or time of day, and do they persist? A change in recorded paid activity could reflect a change in how many people park, how many pay, or both. The dashboard provides a way to examine those patterns, while recognizing that explaining them will require additional evidence.
We are proud to see the dashboard featured in Esri’s gallery and grateful to the ArcGIS Dashboards team for their review and useful feedback. Their input helped improve a tool we look forward to using for a deeper examination of parking demand, payment behavior, and pricing.