Park and Ride Usage Counts in Howard County, Maryland from 2015

Starting in March 2015, this dataset tracks monthly usage at park and ride lots in Howard County, Maryland. Data collection was interrupted during some months in 2020, 2021, and 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The data is provided by opendata.howardcountymd.gov and was last updated in November 2025.

Use Cases

• Analyze seasonal trends in park and ride usage using Year, Month, and Data Collection Date.
• Assess lot capacity utilization by comparing Vehicle Parking Capacity with Car Occupancy and Bike Racks Capacity with Bike Occupancy.
• Compare usage patterns across different locations using Park & Ride Name and City columns.
• Model the impact of external events (like the pandemic) on transit usage over time using the temporal columns.

Strengths

• Provides a multi-year time series starting in March 2015.
• Includes specific capacity and occupancy metrics for both vehicles and bicycles.
• Data is sourced from an official local government open data portal (opendata.howardcountymd.gov).

Limitations

• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Data collection gaps exist for some months in 2020-2022.

Provenance

Source

opendata.howardcountymd.gov

Time Range

March 2015 onward, with gaps in 2020-2022.

Freshness

Last updated 2025-11-03 16:51:20; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Howard County, Maryland, United States.