In Spring 2021, RM3P and the Virginia Department of Transportation’s (VDOT) Fredericksburg District joined forces to take a “project bundling” approach to the procurement of real-time parking availability data at park-and-ride commuter lots in Northern Virginia (NoVA) and Metropolitan Fredericksburg (including Stafford County, Spotsylvania County, and the City of Fredericksburg). Bundling the District’s Parking Demand Management System project with RM3P’s Commuter Parking Information System (CPIS) will expedite both projects, reduce costs through economies of scale, and streamline the contracting process.
While the original scope of CPIS was to deploy technologies in the identified lots in NoVA, the concept always was to utilize parking information lots along I-95 in the Fredericksburg area—both the outfitted Virginia Railway Express (VRE) lots and the remaining to-be-outfitted commuter parking lots. The bundling approach has further solidified the deployment of CPIS to improve parking data availability in select NoVA (RM3P Northern Tier) and Metropolitan Fredericksburg (RM3P Southern Tier) lots. This data will supplement and complement the recently implemented parking information deployed by VRE for its stations in both NoVA and Fredericksburg.
Though there already were funds to implement CPIS, in the interim the Fredericksburg District was granted funding from VDOT’s Innovation and Technology Transportation Fund (ITTF) to deploy a parking information system, which now will be utilized to leverage RM3P’s CPIS for collecting and disseminating Metropolitan Fredericksburg area park-and-ride lot data. This grants the program additional funds to expand its scope and provide more reliable and widespread parking data.
The addition of the ITTF funds adds seven VDOT lots with approximately 7,300 parking spaces along the I-95 corridor to the original scope of 70 lots with approximately 56,000 spaces.
Project Bundling Benefits
- Expedited Project Delivery. Project bundling delivers strategic program solutions by streamlining various project delivery requirements such as environmental agreements and standardized designs.
- Reduced Cost. Bundling projects with shared features leverages design expertise and achieves economies of scale.
- Contracting Efficiency. Using a single contract award for several similar projects streamlines design and construction and saves procurement time.
From the FHWA Center for Accelerating Innovation.