Current Research
C2SMART Tier 1 UTC: A Smart Parking Management Tool for University Campuses
C2SMART is the acronym for Connected Cities for Smart Mobility towards Accessible and Resilient Transportation. It is a Tier 1 University Transportation Center funded by U.S. Dept. of Transportation. UTEP is a partner in C2SMART.
Every vehicle trip starts and ends with parking, making parking facilities main components of transportation infrastructure. Universities face particularly complex parking problems due to the wide variety of facilities, users and trip purposes. Every university has a parking department responsible for the implementation of parking policies. The common parking management strategies are zoning of parking lots, limiting accessibility of lots to certain types of users, differentiation of permits and prices, preferential treatment (e.g., for carpool vehicles), among others. This project aims to develop a student parking lot zoning model and a zone permit pricing model, and then integrate both models into an Microsoft Excel-based software tool named Sparkman, which can be used by all university parking offices.