Case Study: City of Santa Monica evaluates free parking impact with ParkHub

City of Santa Monica - Customer Case Study

The City of Santa Monica needed to stimulate downtown economic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic while managing parking availability and preserving revenue. To evaluate a holiday-season free parking initiative, the city worked with ParkHub’s parking business intelligence tooling, using Smarking BI to understand whether free parking would increase visitation or simply reduce income.

ParkHub helped Santa Monica pilot free parking in structures 1 through 6 while keeping structures 7 and 8 paid, then analyzed the results using year-over-year transaction data. The findings showed free parking did not meaningfully shift parkers from paid facilities or significantly boost visitation, and the city lost about $128,000 in revenue; based on these results, ParkHub recommended keeping parking paid to better manage turnover and protect revenue.

City of Santa Monica

Henry Servin

Parking Manager