Smartphone apps will soon help you find parking in S.F.

Comments (0) By Patricia Decker Wednesday, Aug 18 2010

What do you do when you've been circling the block, endlessly searching for a parking space in a city full of drivers who love to bemoan the dearth of parking even more than the abundance of summer fog? Put your hands together — drive with your elbows — and pray to the parking gods.

Fred Noland

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But this driving drama could soon face its final curtain, thanks to an army of smart meters ready to remove the element of luck from scoring an on-street spot. Goodbye, complaining, finger-crossing, and strategizing. Hello, real-time parking information.

As the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) unveiled 190 smart parking meters last month for its SFPark pilot program, the reward offered to drivers in exchange for potentially higher parking rates was the promise of being able to find parking spaces via a free smart-phone app.

While S.F. motorists won't see the data on 511.org or through the app until early next year, Muni riders are already familiar with the double-edged sword that is real-time arrival information. Third-party data-cruncher NextBus generates the arrival time information that offers riders such sarcastic and unhelpful updates as "22-Fillmore in 138 minutes." Then there's the false hope created when NextBus promises a bus is due in two minutes, but it never arrives.

Riders aren't the only ones irked by the bad time estimates. Software developers say Muni's data is too cumbersome to put into applications, because transit updates are spaced too far apart.

"People don't trust these numbers still because they're not always true," says Ljuba Miljkovic, who created the award-winning Transporter app. "The promise of a perfect information system is really, really hard to achieve."

SFMTA officials, however, are vowing to learn from their mistakes. This time, its engineers will collect parking data and evaluate it before making it available. But squabbles over data ownership have also tripped up developers, including Steven Peterson, who created Routesy, a Muni iPhone app. Peterson found his work ousted from Apple's online store after another third-party developer claimed ownership of the data, demanded royalties, and filed a complaint with Apple when Peterson didn't pay up. "There was some fuzziness about who actually owned the data," Peterson recalls.

This time around, SFPark project leader Jay Primus says, the SFMTA has locked in ownership of the parking sensor information: "A very important part of our agreement with [the sensor and meter companies] is that the data is paid for and owned by the SFMTA. This is public funds producing public data."

Start your engines, San Francisco, but make sure to buckle up: This could be a bumpy ride.