By adopting real-time analytics and stakeholder-driven strategies, Bend, Oregon, has become a model for parking innovation.
By Tobias Marx and Sonny Samra
The city of Bend, Oregon, has a long history of parking innovation, perhaps best exemplified by its Downtown Strategic Parking Management Plan. Finalized in 2017, the plan has guided the city in its efforts to manage its limited downtown parking resources as optimally as possible while balancing the concerns of residents and businesses.
More recently, Bend has continued to take innovative steps to improve parking in its downtown through the careful adoption of smart sensors and real-time data analytics to monitor parking availability, optimize enforcement, and provide insights into parking patterns. Through these and other approaches, Bend is able to determine parking occupancy and readily communicate these details to parkers, enabling them to locate available spaces faster and more efficiently. At the same time, Bend has been able to reallocate its parking enforcement resources, improving overall performance and efficiency throughout the city.
Bend’s efforts to enhance convenience, reduce congestion, and improve the overall parking experience have established it as a model for other cities to follow.
Background on Bend
Where does one begin to write a parking story about a city as beautiful as Bend? It starts where all good parking stories begin — with a parking meter.
But before we dive into that, let's set the stage for Bend. The Bend of today wasn’t always a mecca for outdoor enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and startups. However, in a way, Bend has always embodied an entrepreneurial spirit.
Historically, Bend was a mill town, taking advantage of the Deschutes River and its surrounding forests. Besides lumber, there wasn't much to do in Bend. Like other small lumber towns, Bend was left behind when the lumber industry faded in the mid-to-late 1970s.
Surprisingly, Bend had paid parking back then. In fact, Bend was one of the first cities to implement parking meters on its downtown main street, showcasing an early embrace of parking innovation. Although the exact date for when meters were installed downtown remains uncertain, they can be seen in black-and-white images at the Bend Historical Museum, likely from the 1940s or 1950s.
Bend's transformation from a lumber town to one of the fastest-growing cities in the country didn't happen overnight. To revitalize downtown in the 1980s, the city removed parking meters to spur economic improvement. Whether the meters caused the economic downturn of the 1980s or their removal contributed to the subsequent turnaround is up for debate. However, this meter removal made on-street parking in Bend free.
This does not mean Bend completely disregarded parking. Like many cities, Bend has conducted numerous parking studies throughout the decades, culminating in the creation of the Downtown Strategic Parking Management Plan to ensure the parking system can grow with the city and support economic mobility for small businesses. As a result of these studies, the city introduced paid surface lots and a paid garage to better manage parking demand, while keeping on-street parking free.
Optimizing downtown Bend's parking: a strategic approach
The Bend Downtown Strategic Parking Management Plan was and remains a forward-thinking initiative designed to optimize the limited public parking resources in downtown Bend and elevate the parking experience.
Central to this effort was the formation of the Downtown Stakeholder Advisory Committee. This committee, comprising downtown residents, employees, employers, property owners, and community members, spent 18 months across 10 dedicated meetings to develop goals, analyze data, and craft effective strategies to improve parking conditions.
The resulting plan featured a comprehensive set of parking management strategies, ensuring the creation, funding, staffing, and implementation of a robust management structure. It prioritized flexibility to adapt to changing conditions and established a Downtown Parking Advisory Committee (DPAC) as a standing committee to maintain ongoing communication between the city and downtown stakeholders during the plan's implementation.
A key aim of the plan is to ensure convenience and efficiency, effectively matching the right user to the right parking spot.
Parking plays a crucial element in downtown economic development, requiring effective management to meet the needs of priority users — namely, customers and visitors. The overarching goal is to support a vibrant, diverse, attractive, and uniquely identifiable downtown.
The city recognized that the parking system must be simple, safe, secure, financially sound, affordable to users, and seamlessly integrated with other modes of access.
Designed to support economic mobility and create a future-proof parking ecosystem that would cater to the diverse people visiting downtown Bend, the parking plan includes the following “Guiding Principles”:
• City role and coordination. The city's primary role will be to prioritize customer and visitor access downtown and facilitate residential and guest access in adjacent neighborhoods.
• Priority users. The most convenient on-street parking will be reserved for customers and visitors.
• Active capacity management.The 85% Rule will guide public parking management decisions.
• Information systems. Data collection and performance measurements will facilitate decision-making.
• Integration with other modes.Alternative travel modes, particularly for employees, will be encouraged and supported.
• Planning for future supply. Future parking supply planning will be strategic and regularly evaluated to respond to growth. Funding will involve various resources and partnerships.
• Financial viability.All parking operations will be financially sustainable.
Blueprint for innovation
When Bend commissioned the Downtown Parking Strategic Management Plan, the city didn’t have a strong focus or staff dedicated to its implementation. Yet, the plan and its seven guiding principles became the blueprint for how the city modernized and innovated its approach to parking.
The Downtown Parking Advisory Committee, comprising business owners, community members, and newly hired city leadership, picked up that blueprint and went to work!
Bend's current parking ecosystem is a testament to that group's work and to a city committed to innovation, a city that is eager and excited to explore the integration of cutting-edge technologies and data-driven solutions. The city also follows rigorous continuous improvement processes to ensure projects are achieving the desired outcomes and are equitable for all.

A fully integrated parking ecosystem
Bend has partnered with the smart parking solutions provider Cleverciti, installing aerial sensors to precisely detect parking occupancy and violations, along with integrated digital signage to communicate dynamic, real-time parking availability downtown. The Cleverciti solution provides the city with valuable insights into parking dynamics and helps parkers find spaces easier, faster, and more efficiently.
By utilizing unique identifiers for each parking space, the city has made enforcement more strategic and efficient. Parking sensors that are part of an Internet of Things (IoT) network have been installed throughout downtown to continuously collect data and provide accurate parking information, including availability, turnover, and utilization.
Like a salmon swimming against the flow in the Deschutes River, the city might be the first in North America to move “backward” by initiating a return to a pay-by-space payment system, bucking the trend toward the use of payment and enforcement systems employing license plate recognition (LPR) technology. Previously, the city had a license-plate-based system and had been using LPR-based enforcement in its downtown parking district. The move away from LPR enabled the city to leverage its parking sensors for strategic, guided enforcement.
Bend's enforcement platform was already part of its holistic parking ecosystem, developed in collaboration with the parking compliance and curbside payment solutions provider Passport Labs, Inc. The installation of Cleverciti's sensors enabled the city to go a step further, creating a revolutionary approach to parking enforcement. With this integration, enforcement officers no longer need to "chalk" cars to track the length of stay. Instead, a map-based data portal guides enforcement teams directly to spaces and cars in violation. Furthermore, enforcement officers no longer check the license plate of a vehicle for payment information; they simply consult the map to see if a parked vehicle is engaged in one of four types of violations: overstaying, failing to pay, parking in a non-space, or occupying an electric vehicle (EV) charging space without charging.
Moreover, the city has integrated all payment providers, including mobile apps and pay stations, into this comprehensive data and enforcement portal. This holistic approach ensures that parking management is efficient, user-friendly, and adaptable to future changes.
Positive outcomes
Since Bend adopted these innovative technologies, parkers in the city have achieved improved compliance with current parking policies and regulations. More importantly, the enforcement team now issues many fewer “bad citations,” meaning citations to parkers who have just paid or are in the process of doing so. Bad citations occurred because payment data took time to show up in the enforcement system. In other words, when an officer checked a license plate and didn't see a payment transaction, they issued a parking citation. These bad citations caused a lot of frustration for parkers and added to the city’s workload and administrative costs because they were frequently appealed.
In contrast, a “good citation” will stick! A good citation is one that communicates clearly and easily why it was issued, accounts for some grace, and doesn’t seem harsh. Many parkers tend to understand good citations much better. Yes, the parker might still be a little frustrated, but instead of trying to fight the citation and creating extra legwork for everyone, they learn from it and tend to
pay it quickly.
As a result of innovative changes implemented by Cleverciti in December 2023, the city is already seeing positive outcomes. Between January 2024 and December 2024, the city issued 32% fewer parking citations in its downtown parking district compared to the previous year. During the same period, parking sessions in paid parking lots and the downtown parking garage increased by an average of 13%. The data indicates that parkers are using the new digital signage to find and park in designated locations sooner, rather than circling, blocking flow, or causing congestion.
Additionally, the city was able to reallocate enforcement team resources, now deploying one parking enforcement officer in the downtown core instead of two. This reallocation has improved efficiency and enabled the city to expand the frequency of enforcement in neighborhood parking districts.
The city hopes that this innovative approach will achieve the following key goals:
• improving parking availability as a result of real-time digital wayfinding
• facilitating greater economic activity through more compliance and parking turnover
• making data-driven, informed decisions about future policy and infrastructure investments
• providing a simplified parking experience for users
Spirit of entrepreneurship
The entrepreneurial spirit of Bend is reflected in its forward-thinking approach to parking management. City leadership and local businesses continue to collaborate, creating a parking ecosystem that supports economic growth, fosters vibrant commercial areas, forms safe residential areas, and sets an example for future public and private developments.
Local small business owners have played a crucial role in shaping Bend's parking landscape. By providing input on policy decisions, the community has been instrumental in the city's success. This collaborative approach ensures that the parking system meets the needs of businesses and residents alike, fostering a thriving urban environment. Although some roadblocks will always occur along the way, educating and informing stakeholders has built bridges and removed barriers.
‘Parking happiness’
The goal of Bend's parking ecosystem is to achieve "parking happiness," meaning a state in which residents, visitors, and businesses all benefit from a well-managed, efficient, and user-friendly parking system.
Parking happiness is about more than just helping drivers find a parking space. It’s about creating a seamless experience that integrates with the city's broader mobility and sustainability goals.
Effective parking management is the backbone of urban vitality, driving economic growth while transforming city streets into vibrant, accessible hubs of activity. It ensures a high quality of life and upward economic mobility for all.
TOBIAS MARX is the manager of the Parking Services Division within the city of Bend, Oregon. He can be reached at tmarx@bendoregon.gov.
SONNY SAMRA is the chief revenue officer for Cleverciti. He can be reached at sonny.samra@cleverciti.com.