Berkley to use AI service to review, count parking system

BERKLEY — Berkley will be looking to monitor and analyze its parking system for potential improvements.

At its Oct. 7 meeting, the Berkley City Council approved a contract with ParkNav to “develop a parking portal to monitor parking occupancy rates and analyze the impacts of potential adjustments to municipal parking supply and policy throughout and near the Downtown Development Authority’s boundaries,” city documents state.

The city approved a parking study in August 2023. The recommendations from that study included “measuring on-street parking occupancy on a quarterly basis, identifying parcels for expansion of municipal parking, identifying opportunities for public/private parking partnerships and conducting municipal and private parking lot counts on a monthly or quarterly basis.”

The city brought on ParkNav for this project, which is an artificial intelligence-enabled software provider that can estimate parking counts with 80% accuracy. The data is collected via cellphones and cameras, said Berkley Community Development Director Kristen Kapelanski.

“We tried to think creatively in terms of how can we get this done in a way that maybe doesn’t get us to, ‘We’re going to go out and count cars every month,’ but does get us to, ‘We need to have some data to base our parking zoning decisions on,’” she said. “I know that that’s come up quite often. Parking is a hot topic, and also to see how redevelopment and development of different parcels in the downtown impacts our parking supply. Where do we need more parking? Making sure that when we’re looking at public-private leases that we’re locating in places that make sense.”

According to Kapelanski, the proposal not only would monitor parking occupancy counts in public and private lots 24/7, but it would also allow Berkley to play around with the numbers and see how the addition of a parking lot with a set amount of spaces would affect on-street occupancy counts or in other public and private spaces.

“It will also allow us to change parking restrictions if we wanted to do that and see how that would change some of our parking patterns,” she said. “All in all, it’s going to allow me to get the counts that we needed to get as part of this parking study and also to make better-informed decisions when we’re trying to target some of these public-private leases and also ultimately looking to expand municipal parking when our parking fund reaches an amount where we can pay for some of that expansion.”

The total cost of the service is $13,400 and runs through September 2025. Kapelanski said that, since this is a one-year commitment, if the city doesn’t like the service, it can opt out.

Kapelanski also stated that if there are any discrepancies in the data, she will personally check the counts provided by the service.

The council unanimously approved the contract, though Council member Dennis Hennen was skeptical of the service and its ability to work for Berkley. He felt the cities in North Carolina and Texas that have used ParkNav that were cited by Kapelanski are different from Berkley’s layout.

“They have compact downtowns and we have a very linear one completely surrounded by residential,” he said. “It’s hard to differentiate, you know, if someone parked in their driveway or parked on the street and that sort of thing. I am going to vote yes. I think it’s low-cost enough to try it. The caution I’d have is that if it ends up not being very accurate that we don’t waste a lot of time on it. It’s a sunk cost. Write it off. You know, we’re doing this to try and eliminate staff burden and you know if it doesn’t work out, let’s just move on and see what else we can find. So that would be my caution with it. I’m skeptical, very skeptical, but hopeful that it works out.”