Author: Arend Pryor | Created: 10/03/2021
Details: Sharing content created as part of pursuing my MBA degree
Assignment Details:
Background: A city’s administration isn’t driven by the goal of maximizing revenues or profits but instead looks at improving the quality of life of its residents. Many American cities are confronted with high traffic and congestion. Finding parking spaces, whether in the street or a parking lot, can be time consuming and contribute to congestion. Some cities have rolled out data-driven parking space management to reduce congestion and make traffic more fluid.
You’re a data analyst working for a mid-size city that has anticipated significant increments in population and car traffic. The city is evaluating whether it makes sense to invest in infrastructure to count and report the number of parking spaces available at the different parking lots downtown. This data would be collected and processed in real-time, feeding an app that motorists can access to find parking space availability in different parking lots throughout the city.
Prepare a 12- to 16-slide presentation with detailed speaker notes, graphs, and tables.
Your audience is the city council, which is responsible for deciding whether the city invests resources to set in motion the smart parking space app.
Include the following in your presentation:
Outline the rationale and goals of the project
Utilize box plots showing the occupancy rates for each day of the week. Include your interpretation of results.
Utilize box plots showing the occupancy rates for each parking lot. Include your interpretation of results
Provide scatter plots showing occupancy rate against the time of day of your selected 2 parking lots. Include your interpretation of results
Make a recommendation about continuing with the implementation of this project.
Include speaker notes that convey the details you would give if you were presenting.
Hi everyone and thank you for joining us today. My name is Arend Pryor and I’ll be taking you through this presentation
In this presentation, we are going to be talking specifically about the issue of parking space availability within our city. As many of you know, this has been an increasing problem over the last few years and today we would like your feedback on the information and proposal being presented.
Looking at the agenda shown here, this will include the following:
In the background section of the presentation we will cover
An overview of the current Issues. We will present the goals we are looking to achieve by working on this problem and the rationale behind them.
Next, we will take a look at some of the potential causes of the issues
In the Analysis section, we plan to provide
Information on the data that’s being collected and review several comparison charts showing the occupancy rate of our parking lots versus things like the day of the week, parking lot location, and occupancy rate at specific periods of time during the day
Next, up will be the recommendations section where we will
Summarize the information that’s been covered, talk about the data collection process, and provide details on the changes being proposed for this issue
As part of wrapping things up,
We will take a pause to answer any remaining questions you have about what’s been covered and then for those who are interested, we will take a brief look at the references section to show information that was cited in this presentation
As mentioned, this section will provide you with an overview of the issues being faced, talk about some of the potential causes, and provide details on the goals of solving the parking space issues
Here in City-Ville, USA, one of our primary goals is to improve the quality of life of our residents. As such, many of the issues we have looked to solve in the past have aligned with this goal
Over the last few years, our city administration group has been tracking issues related to traffic congestion and the availability of parking spaces within our city. These are problems that have steadily grown during this time and are similar to those faced by other cities of our size
The ability for residents to find available parking throughout the downtown and business districts within our city has become a very time-consuming and frustrating task, often leading to increased traffic related issues that are faced on a daily basis. Issues such as these can lead to extended delays, traffic congestion and even blockages preventing emergency vehicles from arriving to their destination in a timely manner (Morgan, 2017).
As part of our analysis, we have identified several potential root causes for these issues. This includes the massive growth of our business districts and downtown areas, which in turn have led to attracting more families, working professionals, and those attending college, all of whom make up our growing workforce. It was also noted that the growth of the city’s public transportation systems have failed to match the areas mentioned.
Next, let’s cover the goals associated with solving these issues and the rationale behind them.
First and foremost, one of our main goals is to improve the quality of life of our residents, which is the driving force for this review and the subsequent goals. Additional goals include:
Improving the flow of traffic
Reducing congestion caused by those looking for parking
Lastly, we want to shorten the time it takes to find available parking, by empowering drivers with real-time parking data
In this section we plan to show you the results of the analysis that was performed and the data involved. This will give you a real-world view of the issues being faced
Ok, so let’s start by talking about the specific types of data we captured and used for the analysis that was performed. To start with, we identified nine total parking lot locations that were included in this study. For each of these locations, we determined the total number of spaces available, also known as the lot capacity. Next, we collected sample data such as the current number of spaces that were occupied at each lot, known as the lot occupancy, which also allowed us to calculate the occupancy rate percentage for each parking lot location. This sample data was collected from November 20th, 2016 through December 17th, 2016, via snapshots of the data at specified times throughout the day for this time period
Here we have one of our first data charts, also known as a box plot, which shows us the combined occupancy rate of all nine lots by day of the week. The thin lines at the top and bottom of the boxes show the minimum and maximum occupancy rates observed for each day. Looking closely, you will notice that 100 percent occupancy is hit every day. The boxes themselves represent the bulk of the occupancy rates as noted by the line in the middle of the box, representing the median rate hit for that day. Notice that Monday through Friday are the days where the highest occupancies are reached and while still somewhat high, Saturday and Sunday are the lowest. We had expected the weekend to have higher numbers due to residents and visitors using much of the parking as well, however, this was not the case.
This next chart is also a box plot view of the data, but this time we are viewing occupancy rates for each of the nine individual parking lots over the timeframe previously mentioned. Looking once again at the smaller lines on top of each box, we see that the majority of parking lots reach 100 percent capacity, with the exception of lots four and eight. You will also notice that the lots with the highest median occupancy rates are lots one, two, five, six, seven and nine, with a range between 70 and 100 percent. This is not as surprising as these were identified as preferred parking lot locations due to their proximity to key locations of interest.
Next, we are going to view the data in a slightly different way, using what are known as scatter plots. The data elements being viewed here are the occupancy rate of parking lot one from November 20th through November 26th, with the gaps between the dates on the bottom of the chart representing a 24 hour period. The dots represent the occupancy rate percentage at a specific time of day and as you can see, the higher occupancy rates appear to be time specific. For lot one shown here, the occupancy rate follows a consistent pattern day-by-day hitting 65 percent by 9am, reaching 98 percent by 12:30pm, and then dropping to 68 percent occupancy by 4:30pm. These timeframes seems to be consistent with drivers who follow a pattern such as those going to work or school with some arriving by 9am and finishing their day close to 4:30pm.
Here we have another scatter plot, however this time we are looking at data for lot five, which seems to follow a pattern that is similar to parking lot one with some slight differences in timing. Note, the same timeframe of November 20th through November 26th was used to obtain this sample data. By 9:30am, the occupancy rate for this lot hits 65 percent capacity and reaches 86% by 1:30pm, then it experiences a similar drop at 4:30pm when it decreases to 68 percent. This is also consistent with drivers who follow a pattern of going to work or school and finish their day at 4:30pm.
In this section we will do a brief recap of the data above and what we now know, we will talk about the collection of data, and lastly provide recommendations based on this information.
So based on the data we just reviewed, what do we now know?
We know that occupancy rates overall hit 100 percent every day of the week, and that Monday through Friday experience the highest rates.
Based on data showing the occupancy rates for each lot location, we know that the majority of lots are hitting 100 percent occupancy and that six out of the nine total lots have median occupancy rates that exceed 70 percent.
Finally, we know that the high occupancy rates for these lots is time specific as seen with the two sample lots we viewed, where each hit 65 percent capacity between 9 and 9:30 am, they both got close to their maximum around noon and then started to drop off by 4:30pm
We also know that while some lots have reached their maximum occupancy during the day, this is not true for all of the lots as there are still parking spaces available. However, knowing where to go can be a bit of a guessing game.
As mentioned earlier in the presentation, we were able to gather quite a bit of data for this analysis, however, this required quite a bit of time and effort from employees as it had to be obtained manually
Based on what’s been shown here today, one of our goals was to show the value of obtaining this data.
In the future, the preference is to have the ability to obtain it in real-time systematically and store it for historical purposes
The advantages of having this information is in the statistical analysis we can perform in forecasting demand, identifying trends, and providing up to the minute parking information to residents and visitors.
As the old Spiderman principle goes, “With great power, comes great responsibility” (Wikipedia contributors, 2021). Or in our case, with great data comes great responsibility to the citizens we serve.
With regard to the traffic and parking issues faced by our city, the suggestions for changes to be made are as follows:
First, the city should invest in the infrastructure required to collect parking space availability data in real-time. The advantages of making this change include capturing data as it occurs so it can be stored, processed and possibly utilized by the public to ease the frustrations of finding a place to park (Lellis, 2019).
Second, the city should fund a project to develop a mobile application that allows users to locate available parking spaces for our city based parking lots. This mobile application could utilize parking data obtained by the city and provide users with real-time information. Applications such as these can help with parking enforcement, allow users to pay electronically, and aid in disputes related to parking violations, thereby saving the city time and money (Fernandez, 2019).
Third and finally, the city should utilize this and other data to analyze the need for additional parking lots, improvements to our existing public transportation systems, and programs that encourage carpooling.
This just about concludes our presentation, up next we will be looking to answer your questions then jump into a review of the references used for today’s presentation.
Before we dive in, I wanted to thank everyone for their time and attention in covering the elements associated with the analysis and recommendations covered today. I welcome any questions you may have before we conclude.
As promised, the following is a view of the references cited within today’s presentation, for your viewing pleasure.
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