EcoParq is a program of the Government of the Federal District in charge of the Authority of the Public Space, dependent of the Secretary of Urban Development and Housing, whose purpose is to improve the urban mobility and to recover the public space, through the ordinance of the parking in the public way through the installation of parking meters.
Bicentenario Parking Operator (OEB), which currently has operations in Polanco, Lomas, Anzures, and Roma Condesa, receives 70% of the meter-generated revenue, of which 20% goes to the Secretariat of Public Safety for enforcement, for 10 years, in exchange for investment, installation, operation, and maintenance of the system. The remaining 30% of the overall revenue goes to the Public Space Authority for reinvestment in neighborhood public spaces. The Committee for Transparency and Accountability decides which projects these funds will be invested in, as required by the Regulation for the Control of Parking on Public Roadways in the Federal District.
n January 2012, 426 multi-space parking meters were installed in Polanco, regulating approximately 6,000 public on-street parking spaces. The project included an extensive communications strategy that included notifying residents through flyers, placing informational kits in parks, developing a user-friendly website, and especially, creating branding around the system name, EcoParq, which distances the project from the bureaucratic image these systems tend to have in Mexico.
After meter implementation, a considerable number of parking spaces were freed up. Among regular parking spaces (without counting vehicles that were parked illegally or those that blocked entrances), the average occupancy rate fell from 93% to 55%. At peak demand, the occupancy rate was an average 98 percent before the meter system was implemented; this fell to 80 percent after the first year of operation.
The implementation of parking meters in Polanco resulted in lower on-street parking occupancy as well as reduced cruising time. Before, a motorist required 13:26 minutes to find a parking space; the average cruising time is now estimated at 3:04 minutes.
Based only on the reduction of cruising time, the implementation of parking meters in Polanco brought social and environmental benefits in the amount of $287,771,432 per year. The estimated savings would be higher if car use reduction is taken into account as a result of parking fees. It is estimated that the reduction is between 10% and 30% of total trips.