San Francisco is getting a smarter parking meter system
sfpark.org
sfpark.org
This is neither here nor there, since street parking in SF is probably much too cheap now. But doublespeak is doublespeak.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
Of course the problem is that you have to know where those places are. Hopefully they can put little signs on the meters that point people to cheaper parking.
Parking meter revenue for three years doesn't match that: 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.
I'm also in the parking (ticket) business, but on the other side of the coin: http://parkzing.com
Of course this system also allows them to ticket expired meters much more efficiently.
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.
On the other hand, I also grew up in an area with ample free parking, so I certainly understand the visceral annoyance. To me, the convenience of being able to pay with credit/debit cards (rather than having to hunt the seat cushions for loose change) might go a long way toward mitigating that effect, though.
We've had them in Vancouver for awhile now, and it's so handy (after you setup an account the first time). They text you 10 minutes before your meter expires and you can just call and add extra minutes if you're going to be longer than expected.
-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.)
Actually I'd say cities don't scale, at least not beyond the ~5 million people mark. Despite traffic, LA is still reasonably navigable by car, and the LA metropolitan area is about as big as any city should ever be.
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
Perhaps, but pedestrian-friendliness, bicycle-friendliness and mass transit friendliness are directly opposed to another kind of human-friendliness: the kind that allows people, especially families, to live at a comfortable density. The only way to make a city navigable by non-car means is to cram people in at high density: okay for some (heck, I live in a thirty-storey building myself) but not for others.
Cars are unsafe.
Not especially so, compared to a lot of other things.
Cars are energy-inefficient
Caring if other people use energy efficiently sounds way too much like ideology to me.
Good urban development patterns--mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods and the like--are incompatible with car-friendliness
As I said, car-unfriendliness is incompatible with quarter-acre blocks and giving your children a yard to play in. Besides, there's no reason why mixed-use neighbourhoods can't be car-friendly.
Not especially so, compared to a lot of other things."
Compared to other forms of intracity transportation they are horrifically unsafe. They are the leading cause of accidental death in America. They are safer than motorcycles but far, far, far more dangerous than other forms of transportation (which themselves are often dangerous only because of the risk of being hit by cars).
"Caring if other people use energy efficiently sounds way too much like ideology to me."
Highways are public infrastructure. Public infrastructure is by definition a public decision--you can't use public money to build freeways all over the place, fail to allow any other form of transportation, and then pretend it's a matter of individual choice whether people drive cars. And it's impossible to build car-friendly infrastructure without making unusable all other forms of transportation infrastructure as well.
Since public infrastructure is already a public choice, we have to consider all the consequences of that choice, which include safety and energy efficiency.
"Perhaps, but pedestrian-friendliness, bicycle-friendliness and mass transit friendliness are directly opposed to another kind of human-friendliness: the kind that allows people, especially families, to live at a comfortable density. The only way to make a city navigable by non-car means is to cram people in at high density: okay for some (heck, I live in a thirty-storey building myself) but not for others."
Research shows that human beings are not actually all that happy living in suburbs, especially if they have to commute two hours a day through traffic jams on freeways. People like towns just fine, but not suburbs. And a town doesn't have to be car friendly either.
So fucking false. Ever been to a city in Asia, like Tokyo? The fact that the city exists means that there is demand for things like retail stores and public transportation. There's pretty much a train line between any two points in the city. You can actually go to a retail store and buy something useful. (Never happened to me in the US, except IKEA.)
Cities like London and New York (well, Manhattan) do pretty well too. Once you hit a certain number of people, infrastructure becomes possible. Everything gets closer together, and everyone benefits from that.
Perhaps, but pedestrian-friendliness, bicycle-friendliness and mass transit friendliness are directly opposed to another kind of human-friendliness: the kind that allows people, especially families, to live at a comfortable density. The only way to make a city navigable by non-car means is to cram people in at high density: okay for some (heck, I live in a thirty-storey building myself) but not for others.
Ok, whatever, but why should I subsidize that lifestyle? The OP is about paying for parking. If you want to drive your car into the city from the suburbs, you should build the road and pay market price for the real estate that your car sits on while you're here. Too expensive? Now you know why cities exist -- infrastructure costs less because more people can share the same infrastructure. When we build a superhighway to from the city to your house in the middle of nowhere, the cost is high but the benefit is minimal. When we build a transit line from the city along a high-density corridor, the cost is high but the benefit is also high. That's the point of cities -- more for less.
As I said, car-unfriendliness is incompatible with quarter-acre blocks and giving your children a yard to play in. Besides, there's no reason why mixed-use neighbourhoods can't be car-friendly.
Not true. It's incompatible with pretending that there's nobody else in the world but you, however.
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.
>"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."