Quantifying the Inefficiency Paradox: A Comparative Study of Urban Parking Dynamics in Chapel Hill and Carrboro

This summer I designed and piloted a low-cost sensor network to study why Chapel Hill and Carrboro experience real parking scarcity and predatory towing despite having plenty of parking spaces on paper. Working with UNC Transportation and Parking, Chapel Hill, and Carrboro, I built and deployed Spot sensors meant to detect vehicle presence in individual parking spaces and feed real-time occupancy data to a public website. Field deployment surfaced a string of hardware failures — heat and rain damage, sensors breaking under vehicle tires, adhesive that wouldn't bond to pavement, unreliable cloud connectivity, and false readings — that kept the project from reaching the public-facing test I'd originally planned. Rather than treat that as a dead end, I used what I learned to start prototyping a more durable second-generation sensor that covers 10 to 15 spots per unit and mounts overhead on walls, ceilings, or lampposts instead of sitting on the ground, and I'm now working to extend the pilot partnership with UNC Parking around that new design.