Yikes — Paul Barter (Reinventing Parking) tweeted that my comment that SF Park was defunct was incorrect. SF Park is up and running, thank you very much.
Well yes and no. The purpose of SF Park was to develop a system where parkers in San Francisco could use their smart phone to find parking spaces, and thus move quickly to areas where parking was available and find convenience parking. It was also to use sensor data to enable the mandarins at the SFMTA to set rates to reach a Shoupista formula of an 80% or so on street parking occupancy rate.
It seems that if drivers used their smart phones to find parking spaces, they would also use them to determine parking rates and certain areas and then make decisions as to where to park based on that information.
Now we get to the defunct part. The sensors were turned off in 2013 and no on street occupancy data including space by space information is fed to the SF Park app. Therefore a major part of the raison d’etre of SF Park is no long functional.
In addition, the use of sensors to help set rate data is a non starter, so the SFMTA has developed a complex formula for determining occupancy rates to enable rate changes. This is a ‘system’ that frankly had been used for decades to set on street rates. Many meter supervisors could tell by the money collected from meters how occupancy was changing and did in fact make recommendations to adjust rates accordingly. So it seems the $28 million spent by SF Park was to develop a system that had already been developed.
Yes, the name is still in place, and the app does give occupancy information of the city’s off street garages, and does give on street pricing information, but what’s different about that and what a dozen apps available free do in cities world wide? If you look up ‘defunct’ on-line you find:
no longer existing or functioning. “a now defunct technology that only people over a certain age remember”
Ok Maybe Defunct is too strong a word Paul. How about disused, unused, inoperative, nonfunctioning, unusable?
JVH
