Quarters Unnecessary In SF
My friend Matt was the first person to point out that all of the parking meters in San Francisco now have a slot for payment cards. These are "Pre-paid parking meter cards that can be used in lieu of coins at all city parking meters except port meters. Available in $20 and $50 denominations"
To buy the cards, order online or use your zip code to find a nearby vendor. As always, meter rates vary by region and are still the same as if you'd paid with quarters.
Don't want to carry around anything new? San Francisco also tested a pay-by-cell phone system in 2007. I liked the idea, but poorly designed phone-tree registration systems and extra fees for using these services kept me away. (If you try it out and have problems with DPT, contacting the service provider seems more effective than contacting DPT.)
Still, parking in San Francisco is rarely easy. Says NPR,
Finding a parking space in San Francisco can be about as easy as winning the lottery. Drivers are known to circle for 30 minutes or more searching for a spot, clogging up traffic and sometimes causing road rage incidents. But they soon may be able to use their Blackberries or cell phones to snag a spot.
Unfortunately, congestion is a problem that's going to remain. SF is dominant, and people want to be here. Services like GottaPark might eventually help with finding a spot, but at least now we won't need to keep scrounging for change while we settle for meters.
GottaPark To Find Spots In San Francisco
Driveways in the Inner Sunset
Just caught a KRON report on this new, innovative service for adding more parking spaces in San Francisco.
GottaPark will help you find and reserve parking. We are reaching out to private residences, commercial businesses and other organizations interested in posting their parking for rent through our site. You can then use GottaPark to search through the available parking spaces and reserve and pay for the ones you want.
GottaPark is a privately held company with headquarters in San Francisco, California. Our goals are to reduce parking congestion and to simplify the process of finding parking. To reach these goals, we provide a simple online tool for individuals and organizations to rent out their parking spots, and for the general public to reserve and pay for them.
The founder said he got tired of circling blocks looking for parking around Van Ness and in the Inner Richmond when there were tons of open driveways that could alleviate the congestion. So he created a website where homeowners can post available driveways and available times. Drivers can then use a credit card to rent out the spot for a given time.
Great idea, but the system isn't perfect yet. In the KRON test run, the reporter reserved a spot for $2/hour, but when he arrived at his driveway, he found that 1) the spot was blocked, and 2) someone had listed a spot that was only 8 feet long, too short for his car, and half the size of a standard spot.
The founder says that if this happens to any other customers, those customers can email customer support and will be credited an immediate refund. He hopes to implement a feedback system whereby people trying to game the system can be banned, but that's a work in progress.
Another issue is that the system is fundamentally based on the honor system. If someone doesn't move their car, what is the next renter (or the spot owner) to do? Then again, Zipcar and City CarShare have overcome these problems, so there's hope.
Despite the growing pains types of problems, this is a tremendous idea. Post-Bar, I'm going to give this a shot and see if it works. If anyone tries it out, drop a line in the comments.
(Photo by ehoyer licensed under the Creative Commons.)