Smart North Florida (SNFL) and the University of Florida partnered with the city of Neptune Beach to help the community understand its valuable parking data, in order to drive better insights for the community and its businesses.

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Neptune Beach is a bustling Florida beach town dusted with golden sand and local shops. The area known as the Beaches Town Center is frequently packed with locals and visitors alike who are enjoying all things beach culture.

As Neptune Beach's appeal grows, the city intends to better service their parking. This began with understanding parking trends, which is key to alleviating congestion and confusion for beach and amenity access.

During the spring of 2022, SNFL started a parking study for the Beaches Town Center. The study incorporated data from parking kiosks utilized at the beach.

Neptune Beach is equipped with Flowbird branded parking kiosks and apps, which enable visitors to easily pay for parking.

To better understand parking congestion, trends, and needs, the Beaches Town Center provided SNFL students access to the area's Flowbird data. This parking data was uploaded, visualized, and analyzed in Urban SDK's GIS mapping Studio. 

By analyzing kiosk usage students were able to determine which kiosk was most requested for payment. Understanding parking trends also came along with understanding in situ data.

Students analyzed that parking kiosks closest to the Neptune beach City Hall building tended to have the greatest parking usage. This could be explained by City Hall being a landmark in the area, and a location the public needs to frequent — a necessity, as compared to a shop or the beach.

In a follow up to their preliminary research, students intend to identify the needs of Neptune Beach — how the understanding of parking trends can be turned to actionable plans to alleviate congestion and continue promoting smart travel into the area.

‍About Smart North Florida

Smart North Florida (SNFL) started as an outgrowth of the North Florida Transportation Planning Organization (NFTPO) Intelligent Transportation Systems program for Clay, Duval, Nassau and St. Johns counties. Their mission is to harness the power of regional collaboration, coordinated data, and smart technologies to improve North Florida’s economic competitiveness, sustainability and quality of life.

As such, SNFL focuses resource investment in three areas — regional collaboration, data coordination, and smart technology — ensuring that investments are strategically deployed to improve the lives of all citizens in their region. Through integrating these three key values, SNFL efforts result in better policy making, economic competitiveness, opportunity, transparency, and sustainability for all who call North Florida home. 

Throughout 2022, SNFL has partnered with other regional organizations to put their mission to work. Utilizing the power of Urban SDK, and the young minds of University of Florida Association of Information Systems graduate students, a regional collaboration of modern thinkers have taken its course. The students have made headway in creating a smarter, data-driven region through four projects.

About Urban SDK

A global leader in mobility analytics and data visualization, Urban SDK is the only enterprise data analytics platform that equips professionals with the urban planning data needed to make efficient, data-driven planning decisions.

We provide organizations with clean data pipelines, automated performance reporting, and an on-demand repository of data that can be accessed and visualized in our GIS mapping Studio. Urban SDK customers trust in and use our platform to build safer, more efficient, equitable, and sustainable infrastructure.

Learn more about how Urban SDK can help your organization make informed decisions using critical data. Contact our team here.