Tech & Biz

"Smart Parking": Balm for San Francisco's Parking Woes

by Jordan Yerman | July 13, 2008 at 01:57 pm

346 views | 7 Recommendations | 3 comments

Parking in San Francisco sucks. That's not opinion, alas, but fact.

Lack of parking is a serious issue in San Francisco. Donald Shoup, an urban planning expert at UCLA, says his research shows that drivers on the prowl for parking spaces account for as much of 30% of all the traffic in downtown San Francisco.

This issue calls for a new type of parking solution (besides taking the bus, which would be the most straightforward way around the issue):

The city's doing what it can to alleviate the problem, and that includes a $95.5 $23 million program called SFPark that will convert 6,000 of San Francisco’s 24,000 metered parking spaces into "smart" spots. These special parking spots are currently being fitted with sensors that will allow drivers to find available spaces over a city-wide wi-fi network. The network will show available spots on drivers' cell phones and on dynamic street sign displays. It seems like a great idea, which led us to ask why there aren't more of these systems being deployed across the US already.

Locals can hop on Muni (if they have some spare time), but those coming from out of town ("out of town" absolutely dwarfs SF, by the way) must take part in the endless dance of space-hunting, where the goal is to become a wallflower.
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julianw

at 14:05 on July 13th, 2008

Cool idea. What's the public transit like in SF, though? If cities could only make taking the bus as appealing as San Fran's internet-assisted parking scheme will be...

gerrypopplestone

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 19:09 on July 13th, 2008

jordan, I like this story. It's good stuff. But I always found the public transport excellent as well as exciting, but then Im a public transport nerd! Its a long time ago I was there but at some stations you get three levels of public trasport - the Bart, buses and trams. That is a transport nerd's HEAVEN!