A mid-size city’s transportation department has been trying to fund a demand-responsive parking pilot — occupancy sensors, dynamic pricing, a reservation layer for a handful of high-turnover commercial blocks — for two budget cycles running. The capital ask keeps losing to paving and bridge maintenance in the annual general-fund fight, and the usual federal parking money (state infrastructure bank loans, the occasional earmark) doesn’t come close to covering a city-scale deployment. That’s a familiar bind for a lot of planning offices right now: smart-parking pilots are cheap enough to run as one-block proofs of concept, and expensive enough that scaling them citywide requires outside capital nobody’s department budget can absorb alone.

For most of the program’s history, one of the more obvious-looking federal vehicles wasn’t actually available for that purpose. The Advanced Transportation and Congestion Management Technologies Deployment program — ATCMTD, a competitive discretionary grant FHWA has run since the FAST Act created it in 2015 — has funded connected-vehicle corridors, adaptive signal networks, wrong-way-driving detection, freight telematics, and similar intelligent transportation system (ITS) deployments for the better part of a decade. Parking technology, as its own category, was not historically part of that list. Under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA), that changed. It’s worth understanding exactly what changed, how competitive the money actually is, and what the program’s own August 2022 award round suggests about the odds of a parking-focused application succeeding in the next one.

What Actually Changed Under the Infrastructure Law

Section 13006 of the IIJA amended the ATCMTD statute (23 U.S.C. § 503) and renamed the program the Advanced Transportation Technologies and Innovative Mobility Deployment program — FHWA’s working name for the rebranded program is ATTAIN (Advanced Transportation Technologies and Innovation), though the agency continued to describe its 2022 award round under the older ATCMTD name during the transition. Along with the rename, the law extended authorization through fiscal year 2026 and, notably for parking-technology vendors and buyers, added new categories of eligible deployment. Advanced parking reservation and variable pricing systems are now explicitly listed as eligible technologies, alongside congestion-pricing enhancements and automated vehicle communications infrastructure.

That’s a real, substantive change rather than a technicality. Previous ATCMTD funding cycles required applicants to frame parking-adjacent work as congestion management, safety, or freight efficiency — a curb-sensor deployment might qualify as “systems using cellular technology” for traffic management purposes, for instance, but a straightforward demand-based pricing and reservation platform for downtown parking didn’t have an obvious statutory hook. Now it does. For a city or MPO that has been trying to make its parking pilot fit awkwardly into an ITS-flavored grant narrative, that’s one less rhetorical hurdle in the application.

How Competitive Is the Money, Really?

The honest answer, based on FHWA’s own numbers from the round announced in August 2022, is: very. FHWA funded just ten ATCMTD projects, at a combined $45.2 million — part of a joint $49.2 million announcement with the Federal Transit Administration — drawn from a far larger pool of applicants requesting several times that amount. That competitiveness is standard for the program, and a useful reality to keep in front of a city council or budget office asking how likely a given application is to land.

None of the ten winning projects in that round were primarily parking deployments. The funded projects skewed toward corridor-level ITS: an Alabama DOT congestion-management project on I-65, a Port of Los Angeles terminal-operations technology package, transit signal priority work in Chicago, a rural freight corridor project in Kansas, wrong-way-driving detection in Kentucky, a cellular-vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) deployment on the Atlantic City Expressway, EV charging infrastructure planning in North Dakota, a mobility hub project serving underserved riders through NEORide in Ohio, a smart-grid/transportation integration project in Chattanooga, and ferry terminal information systems in Washington State. That spread is a useful signal in itself: ATCMTD has traditionally rewarded projects that tie into safety, freight, or transit outcomes at a regional or corridor scale, not single-city downtown parking programs — and the FY2022 cycle, run under the newly expanded eligibility list, still didn’t produce a parking-technology winner. Whether that’s because too few cities applied with a parking-forward proposal, or because parking projects scored lower against the program’s traditional safety-and-mobility criteria, isn’t something FHWA’s award announcement spells out. Either way, a first-time parking-technology applicant should treat this as a genuinely new but unproven lane, not a sure thing.

What FHWA Actually Rewards in These Applications

The statute and the program’s historical award pattern point to a consistent set of evaluation themes, even before parking was added as its own category:

Safety and mobility outcomes, quantified. Winning applications tend to lean on measurable before/after projections — crash reduction estimates, travel-time savings, throughput gains — rather than describing a technology deployment in the abstract. A parking application built around “we will install smart meters” reads very differently from one built around “we project a reduction in downtown cruising-related vehicle miles traveled of X percent based on comparable deployments in [cities], measured through [method].”

Regional or multijurisdictional scope. Single-city, single-department projects are eligible, but historical ATCMTD awards disproportionately favor state DOTs, MPOs, port and toll authorities, and multi-agency consortia — the eligible-entity list in 23 U.S.C. § 503 explicitly includes MPOs representing populations over 200,000 and multijurisdictional groups. A city parking department that partners with its MPO, a neighboring municipality, or a transit agency on a joint application is working with the grain of the program rather than against it.

Equity and underserved-community framing. The IIJA’s broader mandate leans heavily on equity outcomes, and the FY2022 NEORide mobility-hub award for underserved riders is a clear signal of what that looks like in practice. A parking-technology application that can tie dynamic pricing or reservation systems to access outcomes for transit-dependent or lower-income neighborhoods — rather than framing the project purely as downtown commercial-district convenience — fits that emphasis more naturally.

A credible non-federal match. ATCMTD funds up to 80 percent of eligible project costs, meaning applicants need a minimum 20 percent non-federal match lined up before applying, not after an award is announced. For a city weighing whether to pursue this funding source, that match requirement is often the practical gating question — a $2 million parking technology deployment still needs roughly $400,000 in city, county, or in-kind contribution ready to commit.

Where This Fits Alongside Other Federal Funding for Parking Tech

ATCMTD/ATTAIN is not the only federal avenue a planning office might be evaluating this year, and it’s worth being clear about what it isn’t. It is not an EV-charging program — North Dakota’s FY2022 award covered EV charging infrastructure planning, but that reflects the program’s broad ITS scope, not a parking-specific carve-out, and EV charging buildout is better pursued through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) formula program administered separately under the same infrastructure law. It is not a curb-data or curb-digitization program either; cities pursuing curb inventory and loading-zone management technology have generally built those efforts around locally funded pilots or partnerships with organizations like the Open Mobility Foundation rather than a dedicated federal grant line. ATCMTD/ATTAIN sits in its own lane: a competitive, multi-technology ITS deployment grant that, as of this year, happens to explicitly list parking reservation and pricing systems as one of many eligible uses.

That distinction matters for how a planning office should scope an application. A proposal that bundles parking technology into a broader corridor management, safety, or multimodal mobility narrative is working with the program’s actual track record. A narrowly framed “fund our parking meters” application is technically eligible under the new language but runs against nine years of award history favoring broader-scope ITS deployments.

Practical Next Steps for a Planning Office Weighing This

A few things are worth doing regardless of whether a city applies in the next cycle. First, read the actual funding opportunity notice when it’s published rather than working from summaries — eligible activities, scoring criteria, and match requirements can shift between rounds, and the FY2022 notice already reflected IIJA’s expanded language. Second, start the multijurisdictional conversation early; an MPO or regional council partnership takes longer to assemble than a single department’s internal sign-off, and historical award patterns favor exactly that kind of partnership. Third, treat the non-federal match as a budget-cycle question to resolve now, not a detail to figure out after a notice of funding opportunity drops — a city that can point to committed local match dollars at application time is in a materially stronger position than one promising to find them later. Finally, build the quantitative safety-and-mobility case the same way a corridor ITS project would: cite comparable deployments, be specific about the metric being targeted, and be honest about the uncertainty in the projection rather than presenting a single confident number.

FHWA’s own announcement of the August 2022 award round, Biden Administration Awards $49.2 Million for Innovative Technology Grants to Improve Mobility and Travel on America’s Highway and Transit Systems, lists all ten funded projects and is the clearest available snapshot of what the program actually rewarded under the expanded eligibility language — a more useful reference point for scoping a future application than any summary of the statute alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is parking technology now a dedicated category within ATCMTD/ATTAIN, or just one eligible use among many?

It’s one eligible use among many, not a dedicated funding set-aside. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law added advanced parking reservation and variable pricing systems to the program’s broader list of eligible advanced transportation technologies. Applications compete against corridor ITS, freight, transit, and safety projects for the same pool of money, with no reserved allocation specifically for parking.

Did any city actually win ATCMTD/ATTAIN funding for a parking project in the FY2022 round?

No. Of the ten projects funded in the round announced in August 2022, none were primarily parking-technology deployments; the awards skewed toward corridor-level ITS, freight, transit signal priority, and safety projects. Parking reservation and pricing systems became eligible under this cycle’s expanded language, but no applicant in that specific round won funding under that category.

How much non-federal match does a city need to apply?

ATCMTD/ATTAIN can cover up to 80 percent of eligible project costs, which means applicants need at least 20 percent of total project cost committed from non-federal sources — city, county, state, or eligible in-kind contributions — at the time of application, not as a follow-up commitment after an award.

Does a single city department need to apply alone, or can it partner with other agencies?

Multijurisdictional and multi-agency applications are both allowed and, based on award history, favored. Eligible applicants include state and local governments, transit agencies, MPOs representing populations over 200,000, port and toll authorities, and multijurisdictional consortia. A city parking department partnering with its MPO, a transit agency, or a neighboring jurisdiction generally strengthens an application relative to a single-department submission.

Should a city wait for a parking-specific grant program instead of applying to ATCMTD/ATTAIN?

There is no dedicated federal grant program specifically for municipal parking technology as of this writing, and no confirmed timeline for one. For a city with a parking-technology project that can be credibly framed within ATCMTD/ATTAIN’s broader safety, mobility, or equity criteria, waiting for a parking-specific program that may not materialize is a weaker strategy than building a competitive application now.