Dive Brief:

• Urban transit app Moovit has announced a partnership with parking space app SpotHero to help commuters find parking facilities near transit stations. The new service will launch in the San Francisco Bay Area before spreading nationally.
• Users of Moovit’s Trip Planner will see information on available parking facilities to make it easier for commuters to plan multimodal trips and to limit the amount of circling and idling drivers do.
• "Commuters can help reduce congestion simply by parking at transit hubs, and riding public transit for the 'last mile' of their trip," Moovit Chief Growth and Marketing Officer Yovav Meydad said in a statement. "SpotHero is an ideal partner for Moovit to help users drive, park and ride, instead of bringing another car into congested city centers."

Dive Insight:

SpotHero represents the latest partner for Moovit, which is seeking to use its vast reservoir of data about transit users and service to become a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) platform. The company had previously partnered with Microsoft to share its data on the Azure maps platform, and with TomTom for a multimodal trip platform that incorporated driving directions and real-time delay information. Uber is also relying on Moovit’s data to bring transit information to its app in cities like Denver.

Now SpotHero adds a new layer of data, making it more convenient for commuters who need to drive to a transit station to find parking. It’s an attempt at solving the "first-mile, last-mile" problem of getting commuters to and from light rail or buses. Rather than giving people directions, only to have them lose time by searching for parking, Moovit can now build all of it into the trip. Similarly, other transit agencies are either finding private partners like the Transit app or building their own apps that include not just transit information, but also ride-sharing, driving, walking and microtransit options.

Congestion from people looking for parking has been a nagging problem for cities (and may continue to be with the lack of policy solutions for autonomous vehicles). In response, some cities have started taking steps to reduce the strain on parking, like instituting demand-based pricing. Others, like Seattle, San Diego and Los Angeles, have explored removing parking requirements for some residential parking in order to create more walkable, multimodal neighborhoods.