Streetsblog San Francisco

San Francisco launched the world’s most innovative parking pilot today, a federally-funded trial that promises to revolutionize the way cities manage and price metered curb parking. SFPark will make it easier for motorists to find spaces in busy commercial districts, while reducing congestion, speeding Muni, and improving air quality and safety for bicyclists and pedestrians.

The milestone for SFPark was celebrated at a packed press conference in the North Light Court at City Hall this morning. SFMTA Chief Nat Ford was joined by Mayor Ed Lee, parking guru and UCLA Professor Donald Shoup, and other dignitaries to announce the SFPark iPhone application and real-time parking availability data.

The demand-based parking pilot is being implemented over the coming months, covering 7,000 of the city’s 28,800 metered spaces and 12,250 garage spaces. Drivers, thanks to street sensors, or magnetometers, will be able to check their iPhone application (an app will be available for Android in the coming weeks), or computer, to get real-time data on the availability and cost of parking spaces in 15 commercial districts.

“How many of you have been dumb in your past? How many you have acted dumb? I know I have,” said Mayor Lee. “You know, when you’re driving around looking for a parking space and you’re double parking and you’re running around trying to see whether something will open, you’re dumb.”

“We want to be less dumb about this, and that’s why I’m so happy to launch today’s pilot program, SFPark,” Lee said. “That’s going to be our San Francisco version of congestion pricing.”

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The central principle of San Francisco’s cutting-edge parking management program, SFPark, comes right from Econ 101. If there are more people looking for parking than there are parking spaces (i.e. demand is greater than supply) adjust the price of parking until there is enough turnover on a given street, or roughly one free parking space per block. Sounds simple in theory, right?

On the other hand, implementing the principle in real-world conditions at over 6,000 curbside parking spaces and 11,500 off-street spaces in city-owned garages is very complicated. The federal government, which has paid for most of the program with approximately $20 million in grants, wants proof that San Francisco can meet its stated goals of reducing traffic and speeding up transit with smart parking management. That will require copious data and extensive analysis.

Most importantly for parking managers at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), they want the public to like it. If a driver doesn’t get to a parking space quickly, thus reducing the cruising for spaces that generates up to 40 percent of local traffic in some cities, then the program won’t deliver on its goal. Similarly if drivers aren’t happy with the convenience of the new meters or other payment options, like pay-by-phone.

Jay Primus, SFPark’s manager, understands the significance of his work and has been spending most of his waking hours for the last three years at work or conducting outreach with businesses, politicians and community groups.

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In Pittsburgh, elderly para-transit riders get automated phone calls with the precise arrival time of their vehicle. Bus priority lanes and preferential traffic signals in the Twin Cities are improving on-time service. Here in Washington, DC, stored value on SmartTrip cards pays for Metro parking, train and bus, and it can sync with pre-tax employee transit benefits. In San Francisco, dynamic pricing varies parking rates based on supply and demand, reducing traffic and helping people find available parking spaces.

All of these transportation improvements are happening already – they’re examples of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that are being heralded in a new report as a way to set the bar higher for transportation efficiency. Transportation for America, ITS America and other groups have teamed up to urge Congress to include technological enhancements in its transportation policies. They’re hoping these changes can help us get more out of our streets without building sprawl-inducing highways.

ITS is a catch-all phrase for the ways digital technology can be applied to all modes of transportation. There are familiar forms of ITS on highways. E-ZPass has been around for about 15 years already. Electronic highway signs warning of delays or detours are becoming commonplace. Now, Google traffic maps supplement radio reports to help drivers pick more efficient routes. Add to the mix Zipcar and other car-sharing services, or vanpools with real-time tracking, and ITS becomes not just a method to move cars more efficiently, but to make streets more efficient by taking cars off the road.

“The technologies already exist,” says Lilly Shoup, the report author at T4A. “Now it’s a matter of being more strategic in integrating them throughout the transportation network.”

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In a refreshing turn, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which runs Muni and manages the streets of San Francisco, has produced an informative and whimsical animated short explaining how their dynamic parking management pilot, SFPark, will work.

Unlike the maddeningly obtuse SFMTA website, the video (and pretty much everything else about the SFPark.org website) uses a cute Sim-City aesthetic to explain an otherwise wonky parking policy. It's an interesting approach to take with complicated material, but I think the video does a great job of demonstrating how the system should work, and it does so in just under three minutes.

After covering this beat for over a year and a half, I also learned a few things. For instance, most people don't realize the cost of parking could come down if demand is anemic in a particular area, but I didn't realize the price could theoretically go as low as $.25/hour if the demand requires it. If the good parking managers at the SFMTA are looking to blunt possible public criticism, I think they will do well to highlight the fact that rates can decline.

Parking guru Donald Shoup already picked up on the sim and tweeted it to his followers, calling it a "great new video."

Will something as cute as this do anything to ameliorate the visceral rage parking meters inspire in many drivers? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

San Francisco's parking and traffic managers know the public is going to love or hate the new SFPark demand-based parking management trial depending on how it delivers on the fundamental promises made from the beginning: The trial will make parking more convenient and efficient.

Perhaps no piece of this experience will be as important as the new parking meters. If they function as advertised, they will make paying for parking as simple as a swipe of a credit card and they will de-stigmatize the visceral revulsion that many drivers have when they think of parking meters.

If they aren't simple and intuitive, you can expect the meter-hating piranhas to swarm.

"When we talk about parking at community meetings, people are deeply skeptical of the SFMTA's intentions when it comes to parking management," said Jay Primus, SFPark project manager at the the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which runs Muni and manages parking policy. 

"The explicit goal of [SFPark] is to make parking easier to find, and once you find it, make it easier to pay for, more convenient. That's an important goal in a transit-first city," said Primus. "It's not good for anyone not to be able to find a space and end up circling around."

The SFMTA will begin installing the first 200 of its new IPS single-space parking meters early next week in Hayes Valley. Rather than remove the poles and tear holes in the sidewalk, the new installation is as simple as detaching the crown of the existing meters and replacing them with a new interface that promises to be much easier to use. By August the SFMTA will install a few hundred Duncan multi-space pay stations, the same vendor that manufactured the city's current motorcycle meters.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the installation, at least to people who get excited about parking meters, is that customers will be able to pay with credit cards at all the new meters in addition to coins and SFMTA parking cards.

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The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) has scheduled an administrative hearing later this month so it can move forward with the installation of 1310 new single-space parking meters that accept credit cards, while extending time limits at those meter locations to four hours. The meters are expected to net the agency approximately $1 million annually, some of which will go to fund Muni.

The June 18th hearing is part of the public process for adding additional meters, which the agency routinely does each year. According to SFMTA documents, the agency adds approximately 400- 500 new meters on average each year.

Some of the 1310 proposed new meters are in SFPark pilot areas, some are not, and the SFMTA insisted the installation of the meters be separate from the innovative parking management trial.

"The locations proposed for new meters were prioritized based on several key factors, including where there already are existing time limits and blocks that that are immediately adjacent or within existing metered areas, in part to reduce circling for free parking in certain areas," said SFMTA spokesperson Murray Bond. Bond called the overlap with SFPark areas coincidental.

The new meters are also not part of the controversial proposal to extend parking meter hours on Sundays in select commercial districts, a move that the SFMTA will not likely consider until September at the earliest.

While these new meters are not part of the SFPark pilot, they do share a new technology associated with every SFPark meter: They will accept credit cards, a convenience the agency hopes will ease frustration with meters, reduce parking citations and improve payment options.

"We add parking meters year in, year out," said Bond, which he argued improved conditions for drivers and transit riders.

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When parking expert Donald Shoup publicized his principle several years ago that cities should manage the demand for curbside parking by adjusting the cost so that there was always an available space, he probably didn't think a large city like San Francisco would move from theory to practice so quickly, nor that the city's SFPark pilot program would be as sophisticated as it is.

The San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which sets parking policy and runs Muni, has completed the installation of 8,255 vehicle sensors in the SFPark pilot areas, sensors that allow the agency to track vehicle parking patterns in real-time with unprecedented clarity. 

"The parking sensors are at the heart of SFPark. For the first time, we're going to have a really exciting data set about what's really happening on the street," said Jay Primus, SFPark project manager for the SFMTA. "If you were to ask us now what parking turnover is, or what availability is, or any other parking metric is, we don't really know."

The sensors are made by Streetline Inc, a vendor with contracts in San Francisco, Los Angeles and several other cities. Surface-mounted sensors resemble the Bott's dots between lanes on a freeway, while the embedded sensors are flush with the pavement. The sensors detect ferrous metal within a five-foot radius and therefore can detect both stationary and moving vehicles within that range. They will also communicate wirelessly with new parking meters, which will be installed within the next month or two.

Primus said that prior to installing the vehicle sensors, the data the agency had on parking patterns was limited by how they were collected: The agency used to send interns out with clipboards to observe parking, a method that could not accurately account for how drivers park on more than a few block faces and certainly couldn't give a comprehensive real-time picture to help managers improve parking policies.

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When the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which runs Muni and manages city parking policies, completed the first-ever count of all the publicly available parking spaces in San Francisco, the agency hoped software developers would use the data to create apps to reduce the delays to transit caused by drivers circling the block in search of parking. Through the SFPark pilot, the SFMTA intends to make it easier and clearer for drivers where available parking is located so they spend less time in traffic and less time creating traffic.

One of the first new iPhone apps to take advantage of this data was released this week in the iTunes Store and is called San Francisco Parking by developer by Nick Capizzani, a recent graduate from Purdue University who founded Mobile Parking Apps. The application maps publicly available parking garages and includes hourly rates, monthly and early bird rates where applicable, and general information about meter rates and street sweeping throughout the city.

The app also includes motorcycle meter rates by zone and a feature that queries Craigslist for parking-related ads, from private monthly garage offerings to people hoping to make a buck on game-day parking near AT&T Park. It also has a feature to help users find their cars after parking them and a timer that counts down the time remaining on a meter.

Though it isn't available currently, San Francisco Parking will soon have BART parking garage and lot information through a partnership with Parking Carma, which monitors real-time occupancy data at BART facilities.

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The SFMTA Board of Directors voted to continue the agency's declaration of fiscal emergency today, but took a proposal to charge a premium for cable cars and express bus routes off the table, and promised to use some of the $36 million expected from a state windfall to help "defray or delay" a 10 percent service cut scheduled to take effect in a month

SFMTA Chair Tom Nolan said he wanted to make the scheduled service cuts "less burdensome on riders" by using some of the state money, and directed staff to come back with "a series of proposals to do that." Specifically, $17 million would be used in this fiscal year, and $19 million carried over to 2011-12. A much smaller portion would be used to lessen service cuts.

"Seventeen million dollars will cover $12 million in existing deficit that we have for the current year, and then there'll be approximately $5 million after that we could use to put some service back on the street, at least until July 1st, in terms of the service cuts, and/or rollback or delay the service cuts until July 1st," SFMTA Chief Nat Ford said in an interview.

Director Cameron Beach called the state money "alleged," because the SFMTA has not gotten a check yet. Indeed, the timing of the funds remained unclear. The SFMTA is struggling to fill a $55 million budget gap in the next fiscal year and a $45 million hole the year after.

Ford said he was hopeful about some impending stimulus funds for capital projects that could be diverted into operations. "We're trying to buy time and let some of these things mature before we cut the service, frankly." He said while the next budget cycle promises to be full of "difficult choices," he sees things improving in 2012.

"We've got one more year of stiff belt tightening. However, in year two [2012], we have a very manageable deficit and light at the end of the tunnel."

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No sizable city in the country, or likely the world, has been able to say with any certainty how many parking spaces it has, public or private, until now. Over the last 18 months, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA) has tallied every publicly accessible parking space within city limits, including free and metered spaces on-street and every publicly accessible garage [PDF map].

The total number of spaces, as Mayor Gavin Newsom recently announced on his Youtube site, is 441,541. Of the total, over 280,000 are on-street spaces, 25,000 of which are metered. For just the on-street spaces, that is roughly the equivalent area of Golden Gate Park.

"Most cities have very little knowledge of their parking inventory," said Rachel Weinberger, a planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former transportation policy adviser to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Weinberger called the parking census a "tremendous effort."

"Without the basic knowledge [city planners] have no basis on which to make decisions about future supply policy, about current management policy or even about how their transportation systems are working."

Don Shoup, planning professor at UCLA and author of the definitive book on the history of parking, The High Cost of Free Parking, was excited to hear the news. "San Francisco’s census of parking spaces is a great achievement, and the first of its kind anywhere," he said.

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