Evaluation of Commercial Truck Parking Detection for Rest Areas

Abstract

Florida’s interstate rest areas are heavily utilized by commercial trucks for overnight parking. Many of these rest areas regularly experience 100% utilization of available commercial truck parking spaces during the evening and early-morning hours. Being able to communicate availability of commercial truck parking space to drivers in advance of arriving at a rest area would reduce unnecessary stops at full rest areas as well as driver anxiety. In order to do this, it is critical to implement a vehicle detection technology to reflect the parking status of the rest area correctly. The objective of this project was to evaluate three different wireless in-pavement vehicle detection technologies as applied to commercial truck parking at interstate rest areas. This paper mainly focuses on the following aspects: (a) accuracy of the vehicle detection in parking spaces, (b) installation, setup, and maintenance of the vehicle detection technology, and (c) truck parking trends at the rest area study site. The final project report includes a more detailed summary of the evaluation. The research team recorded video of the rest areas as the ground-truth data and developed a software tool to compare the video data with the parking sensor data. Two accuracy tests (event accuracy and occupancy accuracy) were conducted to evaluate each sensor’s ability to reflect the status of each parking space correctly. Overall, it was found that all three technologies performed well, with accuracy rates of 95% or better for both tests. This result suggests that, for implementation, pricing, and/or maintenance issues may be more significant factors for the choice of technology.