Slashdot Mirror
Sensor Networks In San Francisco Finds Parking Spots
MrSeb writes "You've heard of smart cars, and now, rolling out in San Francisco, is a smart parking system that promises to eliminate the arduous process of finding a parking spot. SFpark is a network of magnetic sensors that have been installed under 8,200 street parking spaces, along with additional information from parking garages and parking meters. These sensors are all linked together in a mesh network, and ultimately link back to a central command center. Drivers can access this parking data via the SFpark website or smartphone app, and see in real-time where parking spaces are available. At any one time, a third of cars on the road in urban areas are looking for parking spots, consuming more fuel, creating more pollution, and causing more accidents. With SFpark, you can see at a glance where there's a parking spot — but in the future, you'll be able to hit a button and have your smartphone direct you to the nearest parking spot."
...now delivered with greater efficiency than ever before.
While this is a great idea, in some cases it'll be a race to get an open spot, even worse than now. Now you'll be able to see open spots blocks away even if you can't get to it in time, so after a while people will know that they need to hurry and exactly where to go.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
The website isn't that usable. Really slow Google-Maps overlay (at least in Chrome on OSX), and doesn't give enough detail to actually see where the spots are unless an area is all-vacant or all-occupied. Except, the big things like garages are useful.
The mobile app might well be better.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Will the system be smart enough to only provide info to the two or three closest cars requesting information? I'd hate to see the carnage when a dozen spot-seekers show up simultaneously to claim "their" spot.
I have visions of a dozen vehicles all converging on the one parking spot that has opened up.
Now we have a new reason for people to be paying attention to something other than the road while they're driving. I'm pretty sure that's just what we needed.
One little detail omitted is that they plan on (and are) raising the meter rates such that it becomes too expensive for some people to park. The goal is to price things such that "there is at least one open spot per block". (I don't know if that means per street-front block, or per 4-sided block.)
That those rates can go up to $18/hr, coupled with the minimum $50 parking tickets is why some people describe San Francisco as having "a war on cars". There's also the little gem that you can't pre-pay the electronic meters for the next morning--so yeah, it's free from 11PM to 7AM, but you have to be there on the dot of 7AM to beat the ticket-wielding meter maid summoned by the electronic sensor. Makes life a little rough for overnight guests who might like to have some wine with dinner.
Not to mention the scam of "street cleaning", which seems to require clearing the street of cars once a week yet somehow get cleaned at best twice a year. And you guessed it, $50 ticket regardless of whether any street cleaners actually showed up.
So yeah, neat technology. It's practical purpose is to raise money for the city and to provide price supports for off-street parking lots.
Remain calm! All is well!
you could tear down a few blocks and build a parking garage and have tons of parking!
-Xen
A reserve button to allow the driver 10 minutes to safely navigate to the spot, which must be within a certain distance according to GPS. Otherwise folks will see the available spot and everyone looking for a spot will be heading towards the small number of spots and competing fiercly, possibly resulting in reckless behavior and safety risks.
Better add a red "Reserved" light in front of each spot. When lit, only the person who reserved the spot is allowed to park there until the allowed time for them to reach the reserved spot expires -- by way of the parking meter refusing to accept payment except by the party holding the reservation, and an automatic parking ticket being issued to the violator.
1. Use smartphone app to locate parking
2. Use smartphone to navigate to open spot
3. Park
4. Receive multi-Franklin ticket from waiting police officer for using smartphone while driving
5. Protest ticket in court that the city is encouraging people to use smartphones while driving
6. Have fine increased by dishonest shill San Francisco court which exists only to fill the city's coffers with contrived fines because that's how the city and county of San Francisco does business.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
In California it is illegal to use a cell phone while driving. Even while stopped at a traffic light. So tell me again how I'm going to use this parking spot locator service? I guess I could pull off the road into an empty parking spot and pull up the app, um, wait... Even if I did this, glancing down at my phone to follow the map to the parking spot would be illegal. Yes, it's a poorly written law. But there it is.
Main feature here is dynamic upward pricing of parking and more efficient dispatch of meter-maids. The rest is window-dressing.
Remain calm! All is well!
There isn't any word of a reservation feature. I'm sure instead of having 1/3rd of drivers randomly searching for parking spots, having 1/3rd of drivers compete for the same apparently few in number spots will work out somewhat less pacifically than wishfully presented.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I don't have a problem with this. I live here, do not own a car, rent one when required ( a few times a year), and I'm happy as a clam.
Leave your car at home when you come visit next time. Shed the addiction.
July 13, 2008
Smart Parking Spaces in San Francisco
This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation's most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment. Drivers will be alerted to empty parking places either by displays on street signs, or by looking at maps on screens of their smartphones. They may even be able to pay for parking by cellphone, and add to the parking meter from their phones without returning to the car.
September 28, 2011
IBM Launches Parking Meter Analytics System
"It's not just a parking spot, think of it as a 'revenue-producing asset,' says Vinodh Swaminathan, IBM's director of intelligent transportation systems. Working with San Francisco-based startup Streetline, IBM has launched a system designed to help cities ease parking congestion and collect more parking fees. Streetline's remote sensors can determine if a parking space is taken by a car, whether a customer has paid, and how much time is left on the meter. And IBM's business intelligence software parses the data and generates reports and statistics for government managers. Drivers can benefit too: A free mobile phone app can help locate available parking spaces."
This looks familiar. Looks like the French beat them to it.
Have you ever tried driving in SF while looking at your phone and trying to find a parking spot? Don't try it.
You need a sober adult with a smartphone to direct you where to go.
This already exists on big parking lots (f.ex. of malls) in Japan, where you can see on a map where the free places roughly are, and in front of each lane of parking spaces you will have another indicator indicating whether there are any free places in that lane. Very useful!
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
The last time I was in San Francisco, it took about 30 minutes to find a parking spot within a 30 minute walk of a small Asian restaurant I wanted to eat at. And if you've been to San Francisco, you know that you will encounter lots of sketchy characters on that walk. The next time we ate out, we found a parking spot on the wharf and then took a taxi from there to where we wanted to eat. If they are really thinking of charging $20 or $30 an hour for parking, the economics will greatly favor catching a cab.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
I misread the title of this article as "Senior networks in SF finds parking spaces". And was like :
Yay, finally someone found some good use for all those seniors strewn about the country. And networking them to. Good job.
Well I guess sensors will work as well, but what will the seniors do?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
I suspect where the future lies... the parking meters will instantly notify the metermaid which meters have expired and still have a vehicle parked in them so that they can arrive quickly to issue a ticket. Maybe, we will even get to the point where each vehicle will be transmitting an identifying code along with the expired meter and the system will automatically send out a 'pay-it-now' ticket to you smartphone, maybe just take the money right out of your account!
if one in three cars is looking for a spot, than one of the five cars around me is competing for my spot. So on a typical street, four lanes wide, each and every single "column" of cars has at least one car looking for a spot.
and my phone tells me that there's an open spot 100 metres away. that's about 15 "columns". Good to know that there's a spot open, with 15 competitors between me and it.
this is yet another idea that helps only temporarily -- until enough people use it. then it because worse than nothing.
Just in time to see someone who ISN'T in the system scoop the space from you.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
These things will eventually be used to make it more efficient for cops to give parking tickets.
He didn't say charging the artificially inflated market rates was the war.
That wasn't intentionally against cars, that just naturally came about because all the parking lots are being built into vacant buildings (like the Metreon and surrounding areas) due to the Kaiser family successfully lobbying to get Prop 13 applied to commercial property at the last second before the election that passed it. Then they sell the holding company that owns the parcel rather than the parcel itself, the property never changes hands, and only the rest of us have our property tax ever go up.
He said that some people describe SF as having a war on cars. For the most part, I agree: SF does.
The city is cash-strapped after a bunch of stupid moves by government, such as Willie Brown spending all that money putting actual gold leaf on city hall instead of paying the city's bills, and all the other boondoggles like the road crews starting all the road projects at once when it looked like funding was going to be cut so that they'd have to be paid to complete the repairs on the roads they'd already torn up. One of the other things we say about SF is "the shortest distance between any two points is under construction".
Cars are their way of collecting revenue from people with enough money to afford cars, but not enough to hire a lawyer. If they could have charged people for having noses instead, they would have.
But I think the biggest indicator of SF's war on cars is Critical Ass, where every militant and semimilitant person in the city gets on bikes, intentionally obstructs traffic, and pounds on peoples cars, frequently damaging them, and if the driver defends themselves or their property, the police either do nothing, or they give the ticket to or arrest the car owner. Unless they're not there at all because they're down on Market harassing the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
You can maybe get around your neighborhood on a bike, if you have a lot of time, and happen to work at or near home, and never need to transport anything larger than will fit in your saddlebags.
Oh, and you can forget public transportation... it's not like Europe.
The buses job appears to be pretty evenly split between making sure the rest of traffic moves slowly enough that people can't get where they're going any faster than if they had taken public transportation (job 1), or drunkenly running over pedestrians or bicyclists (job 2), or providing a warm place for a drunks and druggies to hang out until they've ridden the route several times (job 3).
The trains are largely to take people from somewhere they wouldn't be in the first place, if it weren't the only station around, to someplace they don't want to go, except it's also the only station around.
(Yeah, a bit angsty today; maybe I'll join Critical Ass on their next ride and dent on a Ferrari if I can find one).
-- Terry
How reliable will the system be? All the sensors keep working, every parking spot, all the time, five nines? No damage from cutting into the pavement for utility work? Salt will never find its way through cracks and short them out? The maintenance crews will be just as diligent in the low-income parts of town as they are in the high-income parts?
How reliable does it need to be? How does it degrade? At any given moment it seems like maybe 2%-3% of all streetlights are out of commission, let's say the failure rate for sensors is about the same; what happens? What is the failure mode like?
How will drivers react if the system directs them to drive a long way for a parking space that turns out to buried in snow? Or occupied by a motorcycle that didn't trip the sensor?
Is this thing robust, or is it just a fantasy that makes a good demo but becomes useless the first year there isn't enough money for perfect maintenance?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There are man pages for your wife? Who wrote them? Her or you?
Isn't it illegal to use your phone while driving?
SFPark has been around for a while, and there are other apps around that do this on a national scale ( Parking In Motion, MPA, etc), so I'm not sure why this is news.
I've become a firm believer in "paid" parking or "market driven" parking. That is where we get rid of "free" parking and instead directly charge users fees for the parking they utilize. This article adequately explains why: http://www.lamag.com/features/Story.aspx?ID=1568281.
You can claim the street cleaning thing is a scam, sure I'll agree there that should go away, however, we should not have free parking at all. It is not logical. It only makes sense that the person that utilizes the parking should pay for it. That's how normal things work.
When we have "free" parking, the costs of parking are hidden from the user. This leads to abuse. If you are aware that something is free but obviously costs money to maintain or provide, then by all means as a typical capitalist, you should abuse the hell out of that free service. So now we have grown up with an expectation of "free" parking when that is clearly not the case.
This penalizes us in multiple ways. The strip mall is now twice as large in order to provide a surface level parking lot (the cheapest option). You must now buy a new house or condo with parking due to minimum parking laws (what if I don't need the space?). The city is now designed around cars and not people (we will never get density as long as this is true).
In related studies on traffic, the findings are similar. If we expand lanes on a congested freeway, demand will increase to fill up that lane because the freeway is subsidized. That is, the cost of using the freeway to users appears to be "free" therefore demand increases in order to take advantage of a free resource. The result is for a short period the freeway is not congested, then suddenly it has the same amount of traffic.
"Free" parking creates the problem it tries to cure. Users complain "parking is expensive" so the city gives them free parking, then suddenly everyone uses the parking because it is free and now there is a shortage of parking again. This is like giving people free money. They say "I have no money" so you give them $5 dollars. Then they go spend it. Then they complain they have no money again...
This was a senior design project of mine. Didn't have the resources to implement it, with only a $500 budget, we decided to change it to telling how many parking spaces are in a garage depending on how many spaces were initially available and how many cars had entered.
They're MAN pages, what do you think?
... an available parking space.
What the article doesn't say is that they're only installing this on metered parking spots. So the app will guide you to a spot where you have to feed $8 an hour into the meter, or whatever ridiculous rate SF is charging today, but won't tell you about the free spot 1/2 a block away. Of course, at the rate SF is installing new meters on previously unmetered streets, there won't be any free spots left in the city in a few years. This is all about raising city revenues.
I wonder what happens if I glue a metal plate to the pavement above the sensor...
Sooo... Can i reserve a parking space with a pair of magnets?
Now instead of a few people who were lucky enough to find the same open spot, now you will have hoards of drivers fighting for a parking spot, the media will put some idiot phrase to this "the latest to come out of SF drivers are now experiencing ''Parking Rage". I want to see (if they show any "real data") on fender benders or Parking Riots from those with Parking Rage...
Networks find. A network finds. Titles are often misleading, but short enough to be grammatically sound. Cut the editors' pay if they can't be bothered to use English.
we decided to change it to telling how many parking spaces are in a garage depending on how many spaces were initially available and how many cars had entered.
Which works great until the idiot in his SUV parks it across 4 spaces
If SF is waging a war on cars... Based on the number of pedestrians killed each year in the city, I'd say the cars are winning.
-- QED
So slump in your seat so the cops behind you can't see, cover your phone with your hand like you're scratching your ear so the cops to your left can't see, and keep your mind on the road.
Or you could get a handsfree bluetooth headset, mount the phone on the dash and comply with the law. Imagine that!
-- QED
There are few around here tha say the number of empty spaces on a given level. They may say 20 and nothing is open. Broken sensors.
They could cone-off a space until you pay them off.
"But, officer, I was just using my smartphone to look for a parking space".
"You weren't using a hands-free device. Here's your ticket."