Douglas Karr over at Marketing Tech Blog recently twittered this video talking about wireless parking meters being installed in San Francisco. My boss and I were just talking about something similar to this earlier today.
These parking meters are more than just wireless enabled to let you pay and reserve them. They’re also hooked to a network of sensors for the parking spaces so the parking network knows what spaces are available and when they’ll be available.
You can access the network from your iPhone or other smart phone or wireless device and determine if there are parking spaces available in the area you’re needing to visit. This kind of knowledge might encourage you to visit at a different time of day.
The network also allows the city to change the parking rate depending on volume needs and different times of the day.
Doug questioned whether or not Indianapolis would ever install these because of the revenue that would be lost on people being able to more easily put more money in the meter wirelessly. However, the San Francisco network discovered that there was significant money lost to people risking not paying for parking and not getting caught.
As these networks become more widely available, it’s not much of a stretch for companies like Garmin and TomTom to integrate this information and functionality into their GPS devices don’t you think?
