Universities Turn to Tech and Data for Parking Management

Digital technology helps large public universities manage thousands of parking spaces and permits. Data collected can help quantify their needs, and how best to control the available spots.

By Skip Descant, Government Technology

Published: October 10, 2025

Managing the thousands of permits, parking spaces and rules regulating these assets on college campuses is increasingly being taken up by technology.

“Parking has come a long way. At one time permits were all sold over the counter,” Jeremiah Dumas, executive director of the Parking Services department at Mississippi State University (MSU), said in an email.

The university uses technology from T2 Systems and ParkMobile to manage its 15,500 spaces and 16,700 permits.

“When physical permits were issued, officers were required to look at and [validate] each permit. Now they can drive continuously through a parking lot and scan plates,” Dumas said, noting some of the modernizations that have taken place in the last two decades since MSU began to introduce technology into the parking process more deliberately.

Technology has served not only the internal needs of the parking department, but students and staff as well, who use an online portal to apply for and obtain permits.

“So the way we got into the 21st century was providing those people the ability to purchase permits online, versus standing in a line,” said Shi McGowan, vice president for sales and customer experience at T2 Systems, a parking technology company. “Parking and transportation divisions today have to satisfy both, their internal staff and their [end-user] customer.”

“Over a three-week period in July, we sell over 15,000 permits via T2,” Dumas said. “Their portal is also the location where we and users manage vehicles, which are linked to each permit.”

Like other smart city technologies, digital parking systems generate significant amounts of data, which can be used to better understand parking needs, and the steps the university can take to improve the management of those spaces.

“We use industry standards, data and the system to compare the number of spaces to the occupancy counts, to the number of permits sold, to determine how much oversell each parking lot or garage on our campus can handle,” Debbie Lollar, associate vice president for transportation services at Texas A&M University, said via email.

Transportation officials can also look at citation data to get a sense of how strongly citations influence behavior, she said, adding that parking transaction data can relay to officials how much demand there is for a particular space.

“We use visitor parking transaction data to analyze the appropriate rate to properly manage demand,” Lollar said, noting however, the university has not instituted dynamic pricing for parking, a move taken by some cities to price parking according to demand shifts during different periods of the day or week.

Texas A&M’s College Station campus serves some 80,000 students and 12,000 faculty and staff who have to share the campus’ roughly 36,000 parking spaces. A&M also uses technology from T2 Systems to manage permitting, citations, wait lists for preferred parking, event management and more.

Parking technology is able to see spikes in utilization in particular locations, which could inform decisions about pricing and revenue projections, McGowan said.

Technology is also helping to offer insights into citations, and what citations occur at the highest levels in certain areas. For example, data from the parking technology company Passport indicated one-third of the parking tickets issued in Denver in 2024 were for street sweeping infractions.

“The issue isn’t that people don’t want to comply, it’s that the rules are complex and hard to track,” Gene Rohrwasser, Passport chief technology officer, said in an email. Digital curb management systems make it easier to interact with residents, he said, alerting them of the need to move their car to accommodate street sweeping.

“It enables cities to send residents reminders about scheduled cleanings, integrates digital permits so drivers have fewer chances to miss a rule, and gives cities the data to identify hotspots of non-compliance so they can make adjustments to things like signage,” Rohrwasser said.

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