If you plan to be in San Francisco and you need a parking spot, help can be as close as your Smartphone.
The city will be installing a wireless sensor network in 6,000 of its 24,000 parking spaces. The system will announce which spots are free. The sensor is “embedded in a 4-inch-by-4-inch piece of plastic glued to the pavement adjacent to each parking space.”
Drivers looking for a spot can see which spaces are available by looking at displays on street signs or on a map on their Smartphone. They may also be able to pay for parking or add to the meter from their phone.
Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that this will be good for the environment and the economy. Studying a small business district in Los Angeles in a course of a year, he found that cars cruising for parking created the equivalent of 38 trips around the world, burning 47,000 gallons of gasoline and producing 730 tons of carbon dioxide.
Devised by Streetline, the system offers up-to-date information on whether a parking spot is occupied or vacant. It will also relay congestion information by monitoring the speed of traffic flowing on city streets.
Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor, thinks that the city will embrace the system and will expand it to all on-street and parking garage spaces by 2010.
This new system will hopefully ease congestion caused by drivers slowing down looking for parking spaces.
