99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-08- 99% Free Parking

Episode Date: October 29, 2010

It’s weird how much anxiety comes from parking in a city. Beyond the stress of looking for parking, you must contend with the frequently unreliable meters. The signage can be indecipherable. As a point of interaction with your municipality, it’s … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21centry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. 99% of car trips in the US end in a free parking space. But if there's one thing that urban planning and parking guru Donald Schupe wants you to understand,

it's that so-called free parking is never free. May every time you go to a grocery store, a movie theater, a restaurant, everything you do has a bit of the cost of parking and beddative. Everything except one thing. Chap in your roll is driver. In the suburban environment, free parking is a given. Having a massive tarmac that can comfortably fit

a fleet of cars and also land a 747 is a huge part of the suburban landscape. But even in urban areas, we are subsidizing paid parking spaces because the rent on them is below market value. We also collectively pay for parking with time, cruising for parking, waste time. We've all done it. You go to a place and you see the prices of Wall Street parking.

It's maybe $5 an hour, and it's 50 cents an hour on the street. Well, you'll circle the block until you see somebody going out. Yeah, because parking in a lot is for quitters. If you do it, everybody else is probably doing it and it all adds up. Donald Schoep studied the amount of cruising for parking in the 15 block business district near UCLA and found that in a year the vehicle miles

Travelled while cruising for parking was almost a million miles That's four trips to the moon or 36 trips around the earth cruising for parking and double parking slows public transit In dangerous bicyclers and pedestrians, and that is happening everywhere. Nobody has counted the costs of all this mismanagement for a parking supply. But San Francisco is looking to be the first major city to manage parking well. My name is Jay Primis.

I'm the manager of SF Park for the San Francisco MTA. The new SF Park project uses sensors and networked meters to dynamically adjust parking prices over time. The key ingredient is the sensor, which sends back data about whether or not a car is actually there. For the first time, we're going to know what's happening on the street. And with that sensor data, the parking authority starts adjusting. The sensors give real-time data back to headquarters and the new pricing

is calibrated for the next month. It's demand-responsive pricing. Different times the day make up in price and meters in less traffic neighborhoods may go down to entice people to park there and walk a little farther. But this isn't just about parking. SF Park is about making a better designed city. Lots of cities these days are interested in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and congestion. This is the first time that any city has tested out a parking-based approach to congestion management. That's good for people who drive, but it's really important for people who are on the bus and just trying to get home from work so that the bus is much faster and more

reliable. The goal is to have constant parking availability, one open space for every block so that people get in a space faster and aren't circling the block in their toxins-buing death machines. And it's not just street parking. Pricing in the city on garages will also be dynamically adjusted too. There's no relation between the price of parking on street at meters and parking in a lot of garage. In fact, it's usually more expensive to park in a parking price of parking on street at meters and parking in a lot of garage In fact, it's usually more expensive to park in a parking lot of garage rather than at the meter and that's just the opposite of how it should be. The plan is to change that relationship make it cheaper to park in the lots and

grudges to attract more people, just go straight to those lots and grudges, keeping those on-street spaces available for those who really value them. I think it's been getting the most press about SF Park is all the data about parking availability that will be accessible by the public. And the image is some tech savvy super user who is constantly checking their iPhone to find a parking space instead of watching where they're driving. Which if you picture it for a second is terrifying and would create more problems than it solves. But I think this is the wrong image. If successful, and it's a big if, and the market sets the right value for a parking space,

you will never look for parking with your iPhone, because again, the goal is one open space per block, meaning there will always be parking available. There is no searching. The things you use your iPhone for is finding out how much it'll cost before you leave the house, where you can decide then if it's better to walk or ride the bus instead of drive. The key is that you don't have to know anything to have an easier time parking. Like the best design, it only works if you don't have to work to make it work. That made sense, right?

99% Invisible is produced by me Roman Mars with support from Lunar. It's a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architect San Francisco in the Center for Architecture and Design. Find out more at 99%invisible.org.