Data standards are reshaping parking by reducing integration costs and unlocking the full potential of emerging technologies.
By Jay Landers
During the past several years, the parking industry has seen the development of two critical parking data standards: the Curb Data Specification (CDS) from the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) and the data specifications developed by the Alliance for Parking Data Standards (APDS).
Advocates say these open, interoperable data frameworks can enable seamless information sharing, promote smarter curb use, and power innovations such as dynamic pricing, real-time availability, and multi-modal trip planning. By establishing a common language for key data elements used in parking and mobility, the standards are designed to reduce fragmentation across jurisdictions and vendors, improve operational efficiency, and deliver a more consistent, user-friendly experience for the public and enable owners and operators to gain better insight into the activities of their customers and partners.
Adoption has been gradual, with the CDS gaining a foothold primarily among a small but growing number of U.S. cities looking to improve and modernize their approaches to curb management. Meanwhile, the APDS standard has gained global traction through several large, nationally sponsored projects, as well as municipal governments and technology providers seeking to harmonize data sharing for off-street parking, enforcement, and integrated mobility services.
With parking assets, both on-street and off-street, under pressure and mobility systems evolving rapidly, CDS and APDS offer a framework to unify fragmented operations, clarify misaligned data terms, and modernize how cities and operators manage parking. Embracing these standards could unlock new efficiencies, enable innovation, and better position the industry to meet the demands of an increasingly dynamic urban landscape.
Unlocking data’s potential
As the parking and mobility landscape becomes increasingly digital, data is emerging as one of the most critical assets in managing operations, providing insight into consumer activities and trends, facilitating collaboration among multiple parties to deliver services, informing policy, and enhancing the user experience. Whether it’s space occupancy, permit compliance, vehicle use trends, or payment behavior, virtually every aspect of modern parking operations now generates valuable information. But without a shared structure for organizing and exchanging that data, much of its potential goes unrealized.
“Historically all of the systems providers had proprietary structures to their data,” said Nigel Williams, the president of the European Parking Association (EPA) and chair of the APDS. “This had the advantage of making it difficult for their clients to change providers. For many years, this model was the status quo. However, with the increasing digitalization of parking and the need for operators and service providers to exchange data, it was increasingly no longer viable. The Alliance developed the APDS industry standard to make it easy for industry stakeholders to exchange data.”
The proliferation of smart city initiatives, shared mobility services, and multimodal trip planning tools has made seamless data exchange not just a nice-to-have, but a necessity, said Sonny Samra, the chief revenue officer for Cleverciti, a provider of integrated parking intelligence solutions. With cities and operators increasingly needing to coordinate across platforms, departments, and jurisdictions, standards like CDS and APDS create the foundation for this kind of interoperability, helping different systems communicate without costly or custom integrations, Samra noted.
At their core, data standards function as a common language, one that enables all players to interact more efficiently and build new services more confidently. “It’s kind of like a glossary of terms,” said Samra. “It’s like, ‘Hey, follow this. Everybody use the same language.’” This shared language reduces duplication of effort and the need for costly translation between systems.
The pandemic and the push for curb standards
The CDS emerged in response to a period of unprecedented disruption — and opportunity — in urban transportation. As the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly reshaped how people moved through cities, it also transformed how public space, particularly the curb, was used, said Angela Giachetti, the director of engagement and communications for the OMF, a non-profit open-source organization comprising a partnership between cities and companies looking to address shared transportation challenges.
“When the pandemic hit, there were a lot of changes to how curbs were being used, but also a lot of opportunity to reimagine,” Giachetti said. Along with an increase in on-demand delivery, some cities began taking such steps as creating parklets to provide additional outdoor spaces.
Faced with this rapid evolution, cities and their technology partners recognized the need for a more flexible and consistent way to manage curb space, particularly for commercial and dynamic uses. From these early conversations, the CDS took shape as a means to translate curbside policies into machine-readable formats and enable real-time coordination with commercial actors like delivery fleets and mobility providers.
“The goal was to create a data standard” that would enable cities to engage in three key activities, Giachetti said. The first is to “code the curb,” or publish curb locations and regulations in a digital format, she said. Second, cities needed “to be able to get information about how those curbs are being used, specifically from commercial players,” Giachetti noted. “How are curbs being occupied? What events are happening at the curb?” Third, municipalities required a “common metrics layer” for calculating dwell times, occupancy, usage, and related statistics in a similar manner, she said. Once they had these tools, cities “could make more dynamic, useful curb space,” Giachetti said.
The CDS was released in spring 2022, following its development by the OMF’s Curb Management Working Group.
Cities lead the way with CDS
To date, the main users of the CDS have been the members of the OMF’s SMART Curb Collaborative, which comprises 10 cities or counties that have received funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation (SMART) grant program for projects related to curb management. The collaborative consists of Boston; Buffalo, New York; Los Angeles; Miami-Dade County, Florida; Minneapolis; Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; San Jose, California; and Seattle.
The 10 SMART Curb Collaborative members “have deeply implemented the [CDS], and overall, it’s worked out really well,” Giachetti said. “In terms of what this looks like in different cities, it really runs the gamut.”
For example, San Francisco is “focused on coding the curb, making that information available to mapping companies, to curb users of various kinds, but really trying to create that digital layer that we know is so important,” Giachetti said. In other cases, Portland is using the CDS to a create a zero-emissions loading zone, while Buffalo is using it to communicate dynamic curb policies around snow removal.
Although adoption of CDS has been slow, use of the standard is expected to increase as municipalities look to address the growing number of curb management challenges that they face, including EV charging, ride sharing, autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, and proliferating micromobility options, said Rick Neubauer, the founder and CEO of the parking technology company Umojo. As more municipalities use the CDS, vendors increasingly will be required to adopt the specification, Neubauer noted. As their existing vendor contracts expire, “a lot of cities now are going to all require [the CDS] as part of their new [requests for proposals],” he said.
Samra agrees. “More and more cities are looking to [the CDS] as they lean more into the digitalization of the curb,” he said. “It’s not going to be long before you get the majority following suit” [and adopting the specification], Samra said.
Collaboration made easy
Of course, private-sector companies also can benefit from the use of the CDS. For example, Neubauer shared an anecdote about Umojo’s collaboration with the curb management solutions provider CurbIQ as part of their efforts to help Seattle implement its SMART Grant Digital Commercial Vehicle Permit Project. The project seeks to “provide reliable, modernized access for commercial delivery vehicles at the curb using a collaborative, data-driven approach,” according to the City of Seattle’s website.
Umojo and CurbIQ are “both working on different parts of a project for [Seattle], and then we’re sharing CDS data back and forth,” Neubauer said. “They’re sharing curb data. We’re sharing event data. We call it ‘co-opetition.’”
A common language for parking
Whereas the CDS centers on real-time curb management in the public right-of-way, the APDS addresses the full ecosystem of parking and mobility options. Together, they represent complementary efforts to modernize the way cities and companies manage mobility through better data.
Before the development of the APDS, the parking industry faced significant communication and integration challenges stemming from inconsistent terminology and data structures, said Mike Drow, a board member of the APDS. These discrepancies made it difficult to accurately report data.
To address these inefficiencies, the APDS standard was developed to create a shared framework for data exchange. “The idea of the data standard is we would help reduce the cost of collaboration by defining a common and global set of data terminology and data structure,” said Drow, who led the development of the APDS data specification.
‘A strategic leap forward’
Established in 2018, the APDS was formed through a partnership involving the British Parking Association (BPA), the EPA, and the International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI). The APDS specification was adopted as an international standard in 2023 when it was formally published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 52001-1:2023, “Intelligent Transport Systems — Parking — Part 1: Core Data Model.”
The standard defines common data elements and structures for key components such as parking locations, facility attributes, occupancy status, pricing, payment methods, permits, enforcement actions, and curb usage. By establishing a shared vocabulary and format for data, the APDS specification enables public agencies, private operators, and technology providers to communicate more effectively and integrate systems with less customization and cost.
Without a standard to facilitate interoperability, an industry will not grow, said Ugaitz Goñi, the co-founder and CEO of Mitte, a parking platform that enables parking operators to consolidate their data and payment apps. “It just rots. It’s impossible to grow” because too much time and resources are devoted to integrating incompatible systems, he noted.
Therefore, the development of the APDS “was not just a technical fix” for the parking industry, he said. “It was actually a strategic leap forward.”
Unlocking integration
In the UK, the adoption of the APDS standard has been boosted by the development and implementation of the National Parking Platform (NPP), a not-for-profit, neutral, open-access digital infrastructure that enables drivers to use their preferred payment app in the parking facilities of any parking provider that is on the platform. “The NPP is based on APDS,” Williams said. “Operators and service providers do not need to be natively APDS to join the platform. They can use a simple APDS application programming interface to communicate with it and the other parties on the NPP.”
For parking operators, “using the APDS standard simplifies system integration, facilitates data exchange and reduces costs,” Williams said. The same holds for municipalities, “but also it means that they get much more coherent data sets,” he said.
A major barrier to the adoption of parking data standards, and to broader innovation in the industry, is the outdated belief that data should be hoarded rather than shared, Drow said. “Having a bunch of data that you don’t share with others isn’t very useful,” he said. “Data is only useful when it’s used to make actions or make decisions.” This mindset not only limits the utility of the data itself but also slows down the industry’s ability to integrate new technologies and work across systems, Drow said. Until more companies embrace the benefits of interoperability, the full potential of data-driven parking solutions will remain out of reach.
As the parking industry continues its rapid shift toward digitalization, a common framework becomes essential for seamless communication and integration, Williams said. “The whole parking industry is going to get more and more digitalized. As it gets more and more digitalized, then you need the standard like APDS for everyone to be able to talk to each other.”
Laying the groundwork for AI and AV success
The push toward emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and AVs only underscores the urgent need for standardized parking data.
As AI continues to shape the future of mobility and operations, the parking industry’s ability to harness its potential depends heavily on the presence of standardized data, Neubauer noted. Without common formats for storing and sharing information, AI tools that support functions like forecasting, mapping, analytics, and asset tracking are significantly limited, he noted.
A similar situation exists with AVs, Drow said. “They need specific data so that they know how to operate,” he said. To avoid confusion and miscommunication with AVs, parking providers need to use similar terminology when sharing data. “That’s the intent of the data standard,” Drow said.
JAY LANDERS is the editor-in-chief of Parking Today magazine. He can be reached at [email protected].
