Case Study
Walnut Creek Smart City Case Study
JustPark Drives Smart City Initiatives in Walnut Creek
Who’s Involved
Carla Hansen | Assistant to the City Manager, City of Walnut Creek
Customer Takeaways
We are proud that, now in Walnut Creek, parking is one of the most data-driven components of our urban mobility policies. As we look more broadly at mobility issues, we will leverage the JustPark data infrastructure to integrate, manage, and analyze all sorts of data to support our decision-making.
Carla Hansen, Assistant to the City Manager for the City of Walnut Creek
Summary
The City of Walnut Creek, faced with a parking challenge in its bustling Downtown, engaged JustPark in a partnership to balance parking demand, enhance urban mobility, and foster a Smart City vision. This collaboration led to the successful implementation of the Purple Pole program and a comprehensive urban mobility platform using JustPark’s data analytics.
The Challenge
Manage and optimize parking distribution between the Downtown Core and peripheral areas.
Reduce congestion in the Downtown Core while encouraging long-term parkers to move to the Periphery.
Implement a data-driven approach to support the City’s smart City vision and mobility policies.
The Solution
JustPark's Data Analytics
Using JustPark’s Smarking BI solution, the City can now understand parking behavior, leading to a more effective and efficient parking management program. By leveraging data visualization from the Smarking BI dashboard and a dynamic on-street occupancy map, Walnut Creek can target parking problems more accurately, monitor parking performance in real-time, and evaluate policy results proactively.
Building a Data Hub
As part of its Smart City vision, Walnut Creek launched a dynamic parking guidance system program. The program integrates the City’s on- and off-street parking assets with privately owned parking assets into a single database. Currently, real-time occupancy and price information for more than two-thirds of the paid parking spaces in Downtown Walnut Creek are available online.
Purple Pole Program
Walnut Creek also created a “Purple Pole” program – named for the purple poles identifying ‘Periphery’ parking – that eliminated the two-hour parking time limit in the peripheral zones. The goal was to reduce congestion in the Downtown core and move long-term parkers to the Periphery.
The Results
Increased Occupancy
Both the Periphery and Downtown Core have moved closer to the “ideal” occupancy range (50% - 85%). During the first half of the year, 87% of the weekdays in the Periphery achieved ideal peak occupancies, an increase from 51%. In the Downtown Core, the percentage of weekdays with ideal peak occupancies increased from 39% to 79%.
Reduced Congestion Downtown
The average occupancy over the first half of the year increased by 13% year-over-year in the Periphery and decreased by 6% in the Downtown Core. Weekdays with peak occupancy below 50% in the Periphery dropped from 49% to 13%, while weekdays with congestion (peak occupancy exceeding 85%) in Downtown Core dropped from 59% to 18%.
Long-term Parkers in the Periphery
During the first six months of the year, an average of 298 more people daily used the Purple Pole Program, which provides long-term parking in the Periphery.
In Conclusion
The partnership between Walnut Creek and JustPark showcases the transformative potential of integrating advanced data analytics into urban planning and management. By leveraging JustPark’s technology, Walnut Creek is solving its immediate parking challenges and laying the groundwork for future Smart City initiatives.
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