Primarily funded by the USDOT’s Smart City Challenge, the Smart Columbus Program is a collection of eight transportation, mobility and data projects aimed at improving access to jobs, enhancing tourism, stimulating the economy, connecting residents to safe and reliable transportation, and supporting efficient and sustainable movement of people and goods throughout Columbus, Ohio. The Event Parking Management (EPM) project solution sought to expand the features of the legacy ParkColumbus app that provided public and private parking information, and the ability to pay for and extend on-street parking durations, as well as on-demand purchases and reservations at private garages and surface parking lots. ParkColumbus enhancements under the EPM project included the development of a website (to accompany the app) and a parking prediction model that displayed the likelihood of finding available on-street parking on a given block. Parking availability and other data from 86 percent of the available parking garages and private surface lots in the City’s Downtown and Short North district was captured and transmitted to the EPM Central System and then to the Smart Columbus Operating System (SCOS). The implementation of the new functionalities developed by the EPM project was started in July 2020 and finalized in early 2021.

• The total deployment cost of the website and the parking predictive availability model from the beginning of the project in July 2020 until the soft launch on October 28, 2020 was $1,068,238.
• The total operations cost from the soft launch in October 2020 until the end of the demonstration in March 2021 was $277,199.
• The total deployment and operation cost over an eight-month period from July 2020 to March 2021 was $1,345,43.
• The estimated cost to continue operating and maintaining the application programming interface (API) and nightly retraining with new data is $400 per month.