As an innovative technological solution, SPOT brings parking space management into the digital age.

The transition to a climate-neutral and resilient city requires a rethinking of outdated planning principles (car-centric cities, the Reich Garage Ordinance). In urban areas, large amounts of land are allocated to stationary traffic, often exceeding actual needs. In addition to a lack of equitable land use (compared to eco-friendly transportation and other land uses), soil sealing creates additional risks for heat islands and flooding. Car-centric lifestyles and urban sprawl are further entrenched by an oversupply of parking spaces. As key drivers of demand and action for climate neutrality, cities are increasingly striving to advance transformative mobility policy solutions and measures, yet often fail due to high personnel and financial costs, as well as the need for stakeholders to accept transportation policy measures.

This is where SPOT (Smart Parking Space Optimization Tool) comes in, providing—for the first time—a data-driven, evidence-based solution for calculating demand-based parking space ratios for residential and commercial buildings. SPOT delivers transparent results (minimum and maximum parking space requirements) for any location in Austrian cities in a cost-effective manner, based on digital models and data. SPOT’s methodological approach consists of statistically modeling the parking space ratio based on a dataset curated by experts with meaningful, demand-based, location-specific values (supervised AI), thereby developing, for the first time, a tool applicable throughout Austria for calculating parking space ratios as a functional model. This process takes into account both location-specific (geo)data on settlement structure, accessibility, and other factors, as well as project-specific factors (mobility-related measures, planning details such as car-sharing and bike-sharing services). SPOT integrates seamlessly into planning and permitting processes, as well as into existing planning and monitoring tools (technology and administrative innovation). By adjusting model parameters, SPOT can be flexibly adapted to new requirements arising from changing (climate) policy objectives, and it takes into account the interactions between sustainable site development and climate-friendly mobility solutions through an agile, transferable approach. The interest shown by (climate pioneer) cities (LOI) highlights the need for innovative systemic solutions for determining the appropriate scale of parking supply.

The climate pioneer city of Klagenfurt serves as a test bed for the development of SPOT (administrative processes, including STEK 2035). To ensure a practical and implementation-ready solution, SPOT is being tested as a functional prototype by Austrian pioneer cities (LOI) such as Klagenfurt, Linz, Salzburg, and St. Pölten. The goal is to provide urban decision-makers with tailored support in sizing parking capacity and to continuously address their requirements during the development of SPOT. To this end, a comprehensive transfer and adoption process for stakeholders (administration, planners, housing developers) is being implemented to ensure rapid Austria-wide dissemination of the SPOT approach. On the other hand, the feedback feeds back into the further development of SPOT and ensures the practical applicability of the statistical models. As an innovative technological component, SPOT is part of transformative urban governance; it brings the issue of parking space regulation into the digital realm.