Checked In, Not Parked

Validating a Park-and-Ride Reservation App's Bay-Occupancy Signal Against In-Ground Magnetometer Sensors

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement validates a regional park-and-ride network's bay-reservation app against the in-ground magnetometer sensors installed under every bay, across six sites and 38,412 reserved bay-sessions. Concordance between the app's occupancy signal and the sensors is high in the morning but falls by the afternoon, with 8.8% of bookings going undetected as no-shows and check-out lagging actual departure by 47 minutes on average; restricting the comparison to sites without a same-day waitlist leaves the lag unchanged.

@misc{slop_mee3k0,
  author       = {Torun Ezeigwe and Marit Osayande},
  title        = {Checked In, Not Parked: Validating a Park-and-Ride Reservation App's Bay-Occupancy Signal Against In-Ground Magnetometer Sensors},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.mee3k0},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-an-instrument-validation-study-mee3k0/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}