7 ms·

San Francisco is getting a smarter parking meter system

40 points by abstractbill 16y ago

tptacek 16y ago
Demand pricing. It's "frequently" going to cost less. Now. But since everyone is going to get acclimated to variable pricing, you can bet that it's going to cost a whole lot more in the near future. This is neither here nor there, since street parking in SF is probably much too cheap now. But doublespeak is doublespeak.
- oldgregg 16y ago
  Some call it "Demand Pricing" others call it "AdWords for Parking" -- why yes, we'll be happy to extract the maximum possible value out of our inventory! Didn't some company used to have a marketplace for public utilities? Remind me how that worked out for California? With sensors and networking becoming a commodity, I have a feeling these realtime marketplaces are going to start popping up in industries nobody really expects.
- jrockway 16y ago
  Clearly the solution is to lease all the parking spaces to your friend's company for 99 years, and let them sort it out.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Hey, at least the meters take credit cards now, right?
- coopr 16y ago
  Why should parking cost a whole lot more in the future? This system is being managed with the goal of ~85% occupancy - if there is less than that, prices will be lowered, eventually to $0, to seek optimal occupancy at all times. The only way that parking would, in general, cost a whole lot more in the future was if there was a whole lot more demand - and I'm not sure anyone is predicting that we are facing an imminent increase in the number of cars seeking to park in San Francisco.
scrod 16y ago
The demand-responsive pricing aspect is the most interesting: >"SFpark will charge the lowest possible hourly rate to achieve the right level of availability in both garages and at metered spaces. This project is not about raising parking revenue; it’s about making parking easier to find. SFpark is designed so each block and each garage maintains have about, an average, 20% availability."
inferno0069 16y ago
This is big news for holders of disabled placards.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Why is that? Are they still going to be able to get free parking? Can they currently get free parking?
  - inferno0069 16y ago
    Sorry for not making it clear whether I even meant good or bad news. Under CA law they get free parking at meters as well as in (most) restricted-time zones. It seems like that would continue here, and now the city has the goal of upping the rates to always keep spaces open on every block.
awongh 16y ago
I can't wait to see the live data feed that comes out of this.
hugh3 16y ago
I can't decide what I think of this. In general I almost never park in a metered space because I grew up thinking parking should be free and I'm quite happy to walk an extra fifteen minutes in order to avoid reaching into my pocket. This is why I rarely go into San Francisco except at night and on Sundays. On second thoughts, they're probably going to use this as an excuse to extend metered hours to nights and Sundays, aren't they? Car-unfriendliness is probably the worst thing about San Francisco. If it had a good public transport system it might be tolerable, but it doesn't.
- ojbyrne 16y ago
  There's a city planner who believes parking should never be free - http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/1884829988 http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/1884829988 - I believe he's involved with this project.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Ah, and this gets to the crux of what bothers me about this: I suspect that it's being motivated largely by people who have an ideological objection to cars. They're not interested in enabling me to park more efficiently, they're interested in (eventually) forcing me not to drive at all.
    - ojbyrne 16y ago
      I think they just want you to pay the true cost of driving rather than be subsidized by others.
    - philwelch 16y ago
      Ideology is boring, but there are lots of practical objections to cars, especially within cities, and even more practical objections to letting car-friendliness overrule all other considerations: -Cars don't scale. Cities like LA, Houston, and Phoenix which are designed to be car friendly still have traffic jams. -Car friendliness is necessarily opposed to pedestrian friendliness, bicycle friendliness, and possibly even mass transit friendliness. For any given street, you're going to have to make a direct design tradeoff between car-friendly and human-friendly. -Cars are unsafe. -Cars are energy-inefficient. -Good urban development patterns--mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods and the like--are incompatible with car-friendliness. It turns out you can either have car friendliness, or you can have almost everything else that makes for a good place to live. Of course, as you say, it would be better if SF had better public transit than it does--but there's only so much space and money to go around, and highways are pretty expensive, too. (Up in my state, we're spending billions of dollars to replace a damaged viaduct before it collapses and crushes lots of precious, sacred parking close to our sports stadiums. I'd love to say "fuck the viaduct" and improve public transit instead, but then carheads would complain.)
autarch 16y ago
I don't understand how this variable pricing thing is going to work. Will raising the price really make people give up looking for parking and go home? It seems to me that once you've gotten in your car and driven to your destination, you're pretty much committed to parking there. How high do the prices need to be in order to keep you from parking at that point? And how many pieces will the meter be smashed into as a result of the rage that these prices induce?
- mmt 16y ago
  Will raising the price really make people give up looking for parking and go home? I've actually done this before, on account of parking being too much of a pain or too expensive. It is, however, a "fool me once" scenario, since I'll now only go to the city for business, not pleasure (nor business-pleasure, like company holiday parties).
- houseabsolute 16y ago
  I imagine they'll put a ceiling on the price, but no floor. But if not, at the margin people will choose other means to travel at busy parking times because they know -- at least after the first trip -- that they will be charged $50/hour on the fourth of July. Also, people may choose to leave the city more quickly if the parking price is high. If demand for parking remains consistently high, this may also make it more feasible to build larger parking structures or improve the ones that already exist. Also, the higher prevailing prices for streetside parking may bring other players into the game (like hotels or office buildings) that had before not seen the economic advantage to opening their parking to non-tenants. It's not as though people only become economic participants in the parking market when they arrive; they make the choice to participate when they choose to leave the house and when they choose to stay in the city for four hours rather than two. Regarding the smashed meter problem, it should be a simple matter to add cameras to the devices.
  - coopr 16y ago
    The ceiling, in this case, is $6/hour. The floor is $.25 per hour. Yep, in some areas at some times of day, parking that was formerly expensive (but lightly used) could become free.
tumult 16y ago
Mash live parking data against Google Maps? Yes please. I willingly hand over whatever increase in parking rates you want.
aren 16y ago
There's more that's not being mentioned, and understandably so. San Francisco will reap huge rewards in parking ticket revenue. SFpark is so smart that it knows when a space is occupied and the meter has expired. Parking Enforcement officers don't have to drive/walk around looking for violations -- their handhelds will pinpoint them! Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to seeing SFpark in action. I think it brings more good than harm. I'm also in the parking (ticket) business, but on the other side of the coin: http://parkzing.com http://parkzing.com
- etal 16y ago
  There's one more nice side effect of having ~1 open space on every block -- drivers don't need to circle around the neighborhood multiple times looking for spaces, so the streets clear up a bit.
- MartinCron 16y ago
  Maybe I am alone in this line of thinking, but shouldn't people who are illegally parked get tickets? Ticketing illegal parking is a good thing. It's not in any way liberty-infringing or anything.
hristov 16y ago
And of course the new smart system will enable parking enforcers to give you a ticket more quickly and efficiently as they will certainly have devices in their cars that indicate immediately when any meter in the neighborhood expires while a car is still parked there. I suspect this is the major motivation.
- philwelch 16y ago
  You make a lot more money off parking tickets than you make off of parking meters.
  - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
    Source?
    - philwelch 16y ago
      San Francisco parking fine revenue is on the order of $100 million, annually: http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-08-01/bay-area/17122003_1_meter-violations-higher-fines-parking-operations http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-08-01/bay-area/17122003_1_me... Parking meter revenue for three years doesn't match that: http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-01-25/bay-area/17226881_1_meter-revenue-parking-meters-collection-rates http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-01-25/bay-area/17226881_1_me... True, not all tickets are written for meters, but it's clearly in the city's revenue-earning interest to make it more difficult to legally park and write more tickets. And since a parking meter earns $55-65 with a ticket but only $2-3.50 for an hour of legitimate parking, an entire day or two of legitimate meter use earns the city exactly as much money as a single meter violation. Some municipalities--Seattle, as I recall--expressly prohibit paying a parking meter that isn't yours; the only reasonable rationale for this is to increase ticketing rates.
- rjett 16y ago
  I can't find the article now, but there was something here a month or so ago about the new parking meters in San Fran. I believe you'll be able to add time to your meter and get alerts that you're running low via mobile phone with these new meters.
sh1mmer 16y ago
I know some folks at City gov, I would _love_ to city a public API for this. So I'm about to stick my oar in. I'll let you know how it goes.
dnsworks 16y ago
This from the municipality that had to put a network engineer in prison in order to get access to their DWDM equipment? Then again, parking is like a $125m per year profit center for San Francisco, so they're more likely to get parking collections right than, well, anything else.
dmd 16y ago
Meanwhile, here in Philadelphia, we recently upgraded from quarter-feeding meters to smartcard meters. Unfortunately, the smartcards spontaneously lose their value with worrying frequency, so everyone just uses quarters anyway.
dnsworks 16y ago
I worked out a system two years ago for doing something like this, but with the idea of networking all of the commercial parking lots in San Francisco together, and creating algorithms & equipment to allow for either instantaneous variable-rate pricing, or to suggest parking "deals" for lot managers to announce in order to try and keep their lots full. In the end, I realized that this was price-fixing and that I would probably be sued for it. The government, however, is allowed to do things to the citizen that the citizen may not do.
tlrobinson 16y ago
Supposedly there's going to be mobile phone apps that show you exactly where the nearest parking spaces are. That will be amazing. Of course this system also allows them to ticket expired meters much more efficiently.
invisible 16y ago
This should have included *by late 2012.
jrockway 16y ago
How exactly are the benefits going to cascade to pedestrians and cyclists?
- noisebleed 16y ago
  Part of the hope is that it will reduce overall car traffic by shortening the amount of time people are just driving in circles (distractedly) looking for parking. Apparently this makes up a surprisingly big percentage of the time spent in cars in SF.
lakeeffect 16y ago
These new systems suck because there is never free time left on a spot when you find one. They automatically reset when the last car pulls away, increasing overall parking costs for consumers.
- coopr 16y ago
  Sorry, in this case you are mistaken - the sensors in San Francisco will not be used for meter-zeroing. In fact, they can't be used for meter-zeroing - while they are fairly accurate, they are not accurate enough for this feature. Imagine if the meter was zeroed before you'd actually left!

40 points by abstractbill 16y ago

Demand pricing. It's "frequently" going to cost less. Now. But since everyone is going to get acclimated to variable pricing, you can bet that it's going to cost a whole lot more in the near future. This is neither here nor there, since street parking in SF is probably much too cheap now. But doublespeak is doublespeak.

oldgregg 16y ago
Some call it "Demand Pricing" others call it "AdWords for Parking" -- why yes, we'll be happy to extract the maximum possible value out of our inventory! Didn't some company used to have a marketplace for public utilities? Remind me how that worked out for California? With sensors and networking becoming a commodity, I have a feeling these realtime marketplaces are going to start popping up in industries nobody really expects.
jrockway 16y ago
Clearly the solution is to lease all the parking spaces to your friend's company for 99 years, and let them sort it out.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Hey, at least the meters take credit cards now, right?
coopr 16y ago
Why should parking cost a whole lot more in the future? This system is being managed with the goal of ~85% occupancy - if there is less than that, prices will be lowered, eventually to $0, to seek optimal occupancy at all times. The only way that parking would, in general, cost a whole lot more in the future was if there was a whole lot more demand - and I'm not sure anyone is predicting that we are facing an imminent increase in the number of cars seeking to park in San Francisco.

scrod 16y ago

The demand-responsive pricing aspect is the most interesting: >"SFpark will charge the lowest possible hourly rate to achieve the right level of availability in both garages and at metered spaces. This project is not about raising parking revenue; it’s about making parking easier to find. SFpark is designed so each block and each garage maintains have about, an average, 20% availability."

inferno0069 16y ago

This is big news for holders of disabled placards.

hugh3 16y ago
Why is that? Are they still going to be able to get free parking? Can they currently get free parking?
- inferno0069 16y ago
  Sorry for not making it clear whether I even meant good or bad news. Under CA law they get free parking at meters as well as in (most) restricted-time zones. It seems like that would continue here, and now the city has the goal of upping the rates to always keep spaces open on every block.

awongh 16y ago

I can't wait to see the live data feed that comes out of this.

hugh3 16y ago

I can't decide what I think of this. In general I almost never park in a metered space because I grew up thinking parking should be free and I'm quite happy to walk an extra fifteen minutes in order to avoid reaching into my pocket. This is why I rarely go into San Francisco except at night and on Sundays. On second thoughts, they're probably going to use this as an excuse to extend metered hours to nights and Sundays, aren't they? Car-unfriendliness is probably the worst thing about San Francisco. If it had a good public transport system it might be tolerable, but it doesn't.

ojbyrne 16y ago
There's a city planner who believes parking should never be free - http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/1884829988 http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/1884829988 - I believe he's involved with this project.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Ah, and this gets to the crux of what bothers me about this: I suspect that it's being motivated largely by people who have an ideological objection to cars. They're not interested in enabling me to park more efficiently, they're interested in (eventually) forcing me not to drive at all.
  - ojbyrne 16y ago
    I think they just want you to pay the true cost of driving rather than be subsidized by others.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Ideology is boring, but there are lots of practical objections to cars, especially within cities, and even more practical objections to letting car-friendliness overrule all other considerations: -Cars don't scale. Cities like LA, Houston, and Phoenix which are designed to be car friendly still have traffic jams. -Car friendliness is necessarily opposed to pedestrian friendliness, bicycle friendliness, and possibly even mass transit friendliness. For any given street, you're going to have to make a direct design tradeoff between car-friendly and human-friendly. -Cars are unsafe. -Cars are energy-inefficient. -Good urban development patterns--mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods and the like--are incompatible with car-friendliness. It turns out you can either have car friendliness, or you can have almost everything else that makes for a good place to live. Of course, as you say, it would be better if SF had better public transit than it does--but there's only so much space and money to go around, and highways are pretty expensive, too. (Up in my state, we're spending billions of dollars to replace a damaged viaduct before it collapses and crushes lots of precious, sacred parking close to our sports stadiums. I'd love to say "fuck the viaduct" and improve public transit instead, but then carheads would complain.)

autarch 16y ago

I don't understand how this variable pricing thing is going to work. Will raising the price really make people give up looking for parking and go home? It seems to me that once you've gotten in your car and driven to your destination, you're pretty much committed to parking there. How high do the prices need to be in order to keep you from parking at that point? And how many pieces will the meter be smashed into as a result of the rage that these prices induce?

mmt 16y ago
Will raising the price really make people give up looking for parking and go home? I've actually done this before, on account of parking being too much of a pain or too expensive. It is, however, a "fool me once" scenario, since I'll now only go to the city for business, not pleasure (nor business-pleasure, like company holiday parties).
houseabsolute 16y ago
I imagine they'll put a ceiling on the price, but no floor. But if not, at the margin people will choose other means to travel at busy parking times because they know -- at least after the first trip -- that they will be charged $50/hour on the fourth of July. Also, people may choose to leave the city more quickly if the parking price is high. If demand for parking remains consistently high, this may also make it more feasible to build larger parking structures or improve the ones that already exist. Also, the higher prevailing prices for streetside parking may bring other players into the game (like hotels or office buildings) that had before not seen the economic advantage to opening their parking to non-tenants. It's not as though people only become economic participants in the parking market when they arrive; they make the choice to participate when they choose to leave the house and when they choose to stay in the city for four hours rather than two. Regarding the smashed meter problem, it should be a simple matter to add cameras to the devices.
- coopr 16y ago
  The ceiling, in this case, is $6/hour. The floor is $.25 per hour. Yep, in some areas at some times of day, parking that was formerly expensive (but lightly used) could become free.

tumult 16y ago

Mash live parking data against Google Maps? Yes please. I willingly hand over whatever increase in parking rates you want.

aren 16y ago

There's more that's not being mentioned, and understandably so. San Francisco will reap huge rewards in parking ticket revenue. SFpark is so smart that it knows when a space is occupied and the meter has expired. Parking Enforcement officers don't have to drive/walk around looking for violations -- their handhelds will pinpoint them! Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to seeing SFpark in action. I think it brings more good than harm. I'm also in the parking (ticket) business, but on the other side of the coin: http://parkzing.com http://parkzing.com

etal 16y ago
There's one more nice side effect of having ~1 open space on every block -- drivers don't need to circle around the neighborhood multiple times looking for spaces, so the streets clear up a bit.
MartinCron 16y ago
Maybe I am alone in this line of thinking, but shouldn't people who are illegally parked get tickets? Ticketing illegal parking is a good thing. It's not in any way liberty-infringing or anything.

hristov 16y ago

And of course the new smart system will enable parking enforcers to give you a ticket more quickly and efficiently as they will certainly have devices in their cars that indicate immediately when any meter in the neighborhood expires while a car is still parked there. I suspect this is the major motivation.

philwelch 16y ago
You make a lot more money off parking tickets than you make off of parking meters.
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  Source?
  - philwelch 16y ago
    San Francisco parking fine revenue is on the order of $100 million, annually: http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-08-01/bay-area/17122003_1_meter-violations-higher-fines-parking-operations http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-08-01/bay-area/17122003_1_me... Parking meter revenue for three years doesn't match that: http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-01-25/bay-area/17226881_1_meter-revenue-parking-meters-collection-rates http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-01-25/bay-area/17226881_1_me... True, not all tickets are written for meters, but it's clearly in the city's revenue-earning interest to make it more difficult to legally park and write more tickets. And since a parking meter earns $55-65 with a ticket but only $2-3.50 for an hour of legitimate parking, an entire day or two of legitimate meter use earns the city exactly as much money as a single meter violation. Some municipalities--Seattle, as I recall--expressly prohibit paying a parking meter that isn't yours; the only reasonable rationale for this is to increase ticketing rates.
rjett 16y ago
I can't find the article now, but there was something here a month or so ago about the new parking meters in San Fran. I believe you'll be able to add time to your meter and get alerts that you're running low via mobile phone with these new meters.

sh1mmer 16y ago

I know some folks at City gov, I would _love_ to city a public API for this. So I'm about to stick my oar in. I'll let you know how it goes.

dnsworks 16y ago

This from the municipality that had to put a network engineer in prison in order to get access to their DWDM equipment? Then again, parking is like a $125m per year profit center for San Francisco, so they're more likely to get parking collections right than, well, anything else.

dmd 16y ago

Meanwhile, here in Philadelphia, we recently upgraded from quarter-feeding meters to smartcard meters. Unfortunately, the smartcards spontaneously lose their value with worrying frequency, so everyone just uses quarters anyway.

dnsworks 16y ago

I worked out a system two years ago for doing something like this, but with the idea of networking all of the commercial parking lots in San Francisco together, and creating algorithms & equipment to allow for either instantaneous variable-rate pricing, or to suggest parking "deals" for lot managers to announce in order to try and keep their lots full. In the end, I realized that this was price-fixing and that I would probably be sued for it. The government, however, is allowed to do things to the citizen that the citizen may not do.

tlrobinson 16y ago

Supposedly there's going to be mobile phone apps that show you exactly where the nearest parking spaces are. That will be amazing. Of course this system also allows them to ticket expired meters much more efficiently.

invisible 16y ago

This should have included *by late 2012.

jrockway 16y ago

How exactly are the benefits going to cascade to pedestrians and cyclists?

noisebleed 16y ago
Part of the hope is that it will reduce overall car traffic by shortening the amount of time people are just driving in circles (distractedly) looking for parking. Apparently this makes up a surprisingly big percentage of the time spent in cars in SF.

lakeeffect 16y ago

These new systems suck because there is never free time left on a spot when you find one. They automatically reset when the last car pulls away, increasing overall parking costs for consumers.

coopr 16y ago
Sorry, in this case you are mistaken - the sensors in San Francisco will not be used for meter-zeroing. In fact, they can't be used for meter-zeroing - while they are fairly accurate, they are not accurate enough for this feature. Imagine if the meter was zeroed before you'd actually left!