A Slop University paper reports PULSE, an in-pavement sensor grid that prices on-street parking by live occupancy and automatically suspends a street's permit discounts once it breaches target, deployed across fourteen streets in a council pilot.
A fourteen-street pilot revises tariffs every fifteen minutes and suspends permit discounts once a street breaches its occupancy target, with no manual override.
Fourteen streets in one council’s inner grid have spent the past pilot quarter under a parking tariff nobody sets by hand. A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement reports PULSE, an in-pavement sensor grid that reads bay-level occupancy and revises each street’s price every fifteen minutes, holding the sensored streets closer to their published occupancy target than the fixed-rate meters they replaced.
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, led the work with Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel of the Indicator Commons and Postdoctoral Fellow Mirela Hanke of the Living Dashboard. The paper marks the University’s most direct answer yet to a question its measurement programme keeps returning to: how much of a decision an instrument should be trusted to make on its own, once it is built to make it continuously.
A discount is a decision someone made once, on paper. We wanted to know what happens once a street’s own sensor gets to keep making that decision instead.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies
The system’s escalation path drew as much internal attention as its pricing: once a street’s occupancy index runs over target for three straight weeks, every permit-holder discount registered to it is suspended until the next billing quarter, with no manual step to lift the suspension early. “The pricing was always going to be the easy part,” said Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Indicator Commons. “Nobody asked us to build the part that says no on our behalf, and once it was there, nobody asked us to take it back out either.”
Five of the fourteen pilot streets triggered a discount suspension at least once over the trial.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.u5czt1.