Now, to Find a Parking Spot, Drivers Look on Their Phones

If I am the only person who has access to the app, it will get me off the street and into a spot faster.

If everyone has access to the app, then nothing will change.

Think about it. How quickly are open spots snatched up in downtown San Francisco at peak hours right now? There's not much room for improvement there.

The problem is simply that there is more demand than supply of on-street parking, and people are willing to wait 30+ minutes to "win" a spot.

A much more effective solution is to just raise the price of on-street parking.

Philadelphia did this in 2009 [1]. I don't know if they've done any studies to evaluate the impact, but my own personal observation was that it opened up just enough spots during peak hours to eliminate the need to "cruise" for parking almost entirely.

[1] http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Phila-Meter-Parkin...

Unfortunately the app is unstable and hogs an enormous amount of memory. If you can get it to run without crashing your phone, it gives alerts about memory warnings and "switching to lightweight view", and then doesn't actually show street-level parking data. At least, that's my experience. Hopefully they'll fix it in future versions coming soon.

I know it's not the same as urban street parking, but in a mall I just saw in Guatemala City, each parking space has a sensor. This lets them display realtime information on which areas in the parking lots/garages have free spaces. Each space has a red or green light, so as you drive through you can instantly spot an open space. Pretty neat.

In my province using a phone while driving gets you a $300 fine plus three demerit points (out of 12).