Two-hour coin operated parking meters could disappear from parts of the Upper West Side as early as this summer, with drivers instead paying varied parking prices that would change based on supply and demand.

The city Department of Transportation is evaluating a plan submitted by the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District that proponents say would increase the turnover of parked cars, improve access to businesses, and decrease congestion created by drivers circling the neighborhood for a coveted spot.

If the proposal is implemented, many traditional meters will be replaced with multi-space meters at the center of the block equipped with technology that would regulate prices based on the number of vacant spots.

“We feel parking spaces are given away too cheaply,” the executive director of the BID, Barbara Adler, said. “The goal is to keep one parking space available on each side of the street at all times.”

Flexible parking pricing, also known as “performance parking,” already has been introduced in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and London, where revenues are used to clean sidewalks and improve bus stops, benches, and newsstands.

Parking capacity on the Upper West Side could be monitored through detection devices, or tracked by meter activity, and prices would be adjusted accordingly by increments of 25 cents, Ms. Adler said.

At the behest of the BID and the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, the transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, met last month with the foremost expert on performance parking, Donald Shoup. The University of California, Los Angeles professor and the author of “The High Cost of Free Parking” spent an hour with Ms. Sadik-Khan discussing the BID’s proposed pilot program.

“The best sidewalks in New York are at Rockefeller Center, because Rockefeller Center pays for them,” Mr. Shoup said. “Performance parking would bring all streets to that level.”

The department also is evaluating a proposal by the BID for a buffered, express bus lane down Columbus Avenue.