IBM’s Entrepreneur of the Year, mounts low-cost sensors in parking spaces, retrofits existing meters and ties them into a mesh wireless network to draw a real-time picture of the spaces available, the cars needing tickets and how much to charge for parking. The system is being tested across the country and may be coming soon to your city.

“It’s a sector where not much innovation has happened over the years,” said Streetline CEO Zia Yusuf. “From a consumer perspective, it’s one of those great painful experiences. On a daily basis it can take you 20 minutes to drive from Point A to Point B, then 10-15 to park somewhere.”

Yusuf estimates that 30 percent of congestion in an urban area is linked to the search for a parking space. In a city equipped with Streetline, signs would guide motorists to open spaces and alleviate congestion. An iPhone app launches later this month, and Yusuf says the company is talking to makers of in-car navigation systems. Residents of the California cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sausalito and Culver City may already be familiar with the setup, which is coming soon to Roosevelt Island and the parking facilities in the Washington D.C. Metro system.

“The hope here is that guided parking becomes part and parcel of a next generation of services for citizens,” Yusuf said. “That in seven to ten years, people will look at you funny when you say you used to have to drive around looking for a space.”

Despite the high-tech setup, traditionalists with roll of quarters in the ashtray don’t have to buy a smart phone, since Streetline’s services can be added to existing meters in under four minutes. After the upgrade, existing meters can take quarters and payments by credit card.

“We’re not in the meter business at all,” Yusuf said. “The retrofitting of the meters was exactly because we did not want to make it a requirement for our system to use different and new meters.”

On the back end, parking departments get a view of where to send attendants to write tickets, with expired meter locations overlaid on a Google map. We saw the live feed for Los Angeles’ system and knew exactly when someone had let the meter run out behind Musso & Frank’s. For legal reasons, municipalities still have to send an attendant to write the ticket and ensure the system isn’t malfunctioning or the car doesn’t have a handicap placard or other permit. Still, the process has been greatly simplified.

“We’re completely taking out the process of looking at every meter,” said Yusuf, who estimates a 200 to 260% increase in enforcement. Multiply that by the cost of a parking citation and it’s some real revenue for a city with 20,000 spaces, especially compared to the cost of installing the system: $25 to $30 per parking space depending on volume.

“And that’s everything,” said Yusuf. “The deployment of the network, the maintenance — that’s the turnkey price.” The system is infinitely horizontally scalable, meaning that cash-strapped cities can start with a downtown core and eventually add parking garages and side streets.

Looking at that map, planners can make decisions about a city’s parking infrastructure based on empirical evidence rather than anecdotes. Based on that data, a city can lower and raise parking rates to alleviate congestion or raise revenue, a strategy known as dynamic pricing. “What you get with our system is a dramatic increase in the amount of data so you can make those desicions much more intelligently.”

Photo: Flickr/sidewalk flying

SFpark Overview from SFpark on Vimeo.

See Also:

• Tech-Aided Parking Lowers Your Heart Rate
• Groups Build Parks From Parking Spaces
• Our Bike Racks, Ourselves: Crowdsourcing Two-Wheeled Parking …

Authors: Keith Barry

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