Markets in Everything: Smart Parking Meters
San Francisco is installing state-of-the-art 'smart' parking meters that will alert drivers to available meters via a smartphone app, which also lets folks add time to their meter from anywhere in the city. They'll also use dynamic pricing to try to make sure that 15% of the spaces in a given neighborhood are always available.
5 Comments:
Dynamic pricing? Isn't that what liberals usually refer to as "price gouging?"
Nice, take the whole predictability out of a meter.
as someone who until 2 weeks ago lived in SF, i can tell you that this whole project is really just a smokescreen for muni to raise prices.
the sf bus system (muni) is one of the worst run in the nation and is perpetually drowning in red ink. rather than pass the costs on to bus riders, the city has given muni the revenue from parking meters.
the price of meters has skyrocketed and is now 25 cents per 3 minutes in many parts of town.
these new meters take credit cards. they also have a complex pricing scheme that will allow muni to jack up prices and claim they are doing so to "provide better service".
this has ZERO to do with congestion and efficiency and everyhting to do with the desire for more revenue without making it obvious to the payers.
Predictions:
As per precedants, such as proposing abolition of Happy Meals for "social justice", SF will mandate a certain percentage of parking spaces be set aside for the disadvataged. This will further aggrevate the situation and drive prices higher to subsidize the lower price spaces.
Other cities will quickly adopt dynamic parking rates for meters.
Dynamic pricing is a great idea and is the way most services should be metered, whether electricity or internet bandwidth. If people are worried about getting ripped off, it would be pretty easy to set up auditing to make sure it's working right. In the case of these parking meters, they could just post all the past pricing data on a website, since it's a public service.
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