Seeking Better Parking Data, Boston Breaks Up its Giant Contract

In the world of government contracting, requests for proposal, or RFPs, are rarely exciting to anyone but the company who wins the work.

But city leaders everywhere should pay attention to a creative RFP issued by the city of Boston earlier this year. It’s a potential model for cities looking to avoid some of the pitfalls they so often face with procurement, such as becoming overly dependent on a single vendor or struggling to stay current with fast-changing technology. 

Boston’s effort is the handiwork of Amelia Capone, who joined Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration in August of 2024. Capone had previously worked in Syracuse, NY, overhauling that city’s procurement systems as a fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab. While she has a much different role in Boston — running the Parking Clerk’s office — it didn’t take long for Capone to find herself back in the guts of city purchasing with a giant parking contract up for renewal. 

The contract covered everything from the hardware used to issue parking tickets to the software used to track payments, as well as tasks like booting, towing, and impoundment. As Capone dug into the previous 500-page RFP for the work, she was astonished by the enormous breadth of the scope of work. And yet it also seemed narrowly tailored to the unique processes of the incumbent provider. In 35 years, no other companies had even bid on the deal. In procurement-speak, Boston had become “locked in” with its vendor.

Capone knew well the problems associated with this predicament: uncompetitive pricing, loss of control over key decisions, and vanishing knowledge in City Hall about the work involved. On both sides of the contract, imagining what’s possible had become stunted by routines built around the status quo, limiting innovation. “We only knew what we had been exposed to,” Capone said, adding that much of the parking system felt like it was hidden behind a black veil, “The way that original RFP was written was very much limiting our opportunities.”

A Modular Approach

With the contract ending July 1, 2025, Capone saw a chance to try something new. She wanted to find a way to inject new technology, better data capabilities, and more flexibility into parking management. She also wanted to sync street parking with the city’s broader efforts to balance the competing needs of deliveries, ridesharing, electric charging, and other new demands on curb space. 

Her first step was to get familiar with the current landscape of products and services in the parking market. The city of Boston issued a “request for information” asking industry experts and potential bidders to share details on their products and services. A healthy response from 30 vendors gave Capone confidence that a number of companies might be interested in working with the city, as well as insights into how to structure an eventual RFP.

Next, Capone looked at City Hall’s in-house capabilities. She teamed up with the city’s Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) to assess which services covered under the existing parking contract could be taken over by the city. Things like telecommunications infrastructure, office hardware, and printer maintenance could be pulled out of the RFP and handled internally.

Then came the real breakthrough in Capone’s approach. She took the remaining work and broke it up into four separate modules, each covering a distinct chunk of the parking management system:

• Core software to handle parking violation management
• Core software for parking permits management
• Hardware used to issue parking tickets, such as handheld devices and license-plate readers
• Collections, mailed payment processing, and data entry.

The RFP made clear that each module could be awarded separately to different vendors. Their products and services were encouraged to use common data standards so that they could easily  weave together into a single system. Rather than fragmenting into silos, each module would offer a high degree of interoperability and coordination; the winner of the first module on violation software was required to manage systems integration. “We included a lot of language requiring each vendor to integrate with the other modules to create a smooth, seamless system,” Capone said. 

Here’s why that’s important. As technology advances in one area of parking or curb management — say, a smarter license plate reader utilizing the latest artificial intelligence comes along — Boston can more easily procure the new solution and plug it into the broader system. Shifting to a system that works like building blocks allows greater flexibility and control on the city side.

The vendor community was open to the new modular approach. “In the proposals, there was not pushback or concern from the vendor side,” Capone said, “It was very much taken on as an achievable thing by these vendors.”

Gaining Autonomy and Independence

In the end, Boston received eight proposals for the parking contracts, a big increase in competition over previous solicitations. Capone said the proposals came from a wide variety of companies and presented a range of partnership approaches aimed at delivering the integrated system Boston wanted. Ultimately, city leaders awarded all four modules to one company, Passport Labs. That may not sound like a revolutionary outcome, but Capone said the work Boston put into re-thinking the procurement approach sets the city up to reap big rewards going forward.

For example, Capone expects Boston’s parking management to make a technological leap from scanning lots of paper to a fully cloud-based operation integrated with the city’s data warehouse. That will enable city leaders to use data to make better decisions not just about parking but also  how to manage the full range of new demands on curb space. And it creates flexibility moving forward. On future contract renewals, Boston can rethink any single piece of its parking management system without having to change up the whole thing. 

The full switchover was a success, with the new system debuting seamlessly on June 30th. Capone said Boston learned several lessons that other cities can take away. First is the importance of collaboration across City Hall, particularly with DoIT, the mayor’s office, and, in Boston’s case, the budget office. Second, the team essentially had to relearn their own systems and processes after so many years of being handled by the same company. And third, there’s a lot of work involved in transitioning away from a longtime incumbent; hiring consultants to manage different parts of the project was critical. 

“We’re learning a lot about how to break up with your vendor,” Capone said, “but also how to gain autonomy and independence and ownership of your own system and processes, and have a vision for where you want to go.”