Fred Sandsmark's Blog

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about SFpark, the city's pilot program for market-rate street parking. On October 24 I had the opportunity to interview the intellectual godfather behind the idea, Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA, for a short article that will appear soon in Oracle's PROFIT magazine. Here's the piece:

Market Pricing Meets Market Street
SF Uses Technology to Improve Street Parking

Imagine always finding street parking wherever you go. With the help of new technology, this utopian fantasy is being pursued in car-clogged San Francisco.

In a pilot program called SFpark, officials are linking together sensors embedded in parking spots, multi-space parking meters, and information technology, with three interrelated goals: monitoring inventory, managing prices, and spreading information. The idea: to tweak parking prices in real time so roughly 15 percent of spaces—about one spot per block on each side of a street—is always available. It’s market-pricing meets Market Street.

“It’ll be much more like selling other products,” predicts Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning at UCLA and an advisor to SFpark. And, he says, there’s a side benefit for city coffers: “There’ll be less shoplifting.” (That is, the city will know when motorists park without paying.)

SFpark will publish real-time information about parking prices on the internet and via text message. It won’t send out specific information on available parking spaces, so (at least in theory) you won’t see distracted drivers scanning their iPhones rather than the road. Instead, the goal is to encourage consumers to make informed choices—perhaps, if parking is costly, to travel at another time, walk or take the bus, or shop in a different neighborhood.

It follows that better street parking will result in improved traffic flow and air quality. Research shows that about 30 percent of cars in busy urban areas are looking for parking at any given time, Shoup says, and one study he conducted in the cozy UCLA neighborhood of Westwood Village showed that cars cruising for parking drove the equivalent of four round trips to the moon in a single year. “This is in one little 15-block area,” he says. “The same thing’s happening everywhere in the world.”

SFpark’s pilot program will cover about 25 percent of metered street parking in San Francisco. It starts in spring of 2009 and will run for a year.

In spite of my many attempts, San Francisco officials involved in the project didn't call me back before my deadline had passed, so (assuming the Chronicle article is accurate, which I do) a couple of important details are missing from my article. One, the rates will not change in real time; instead, "The hourly rates would not be adjusted more frequently than once a month and would not go up or down by more than 50 cents at a time." And two, the hourly parking rate could go as high as $18. This last number has prompted a predictable (and perhaps justified) cry of outrage from an aggrieved driver in the form of a letter to the editor, claiming "The future is clear - slowly but surely, auto use in San Francisco will be reserved for the very rich and/or the very politically connected."

Labels: clips, Oracle, San Francisco, technology, traffic