Now THIS is a technology whose time is WAAAAAY overdue: the City of San Francisco is pilot testing a program to use an array of sensors embedded in the streets that can determine parking availability, then share that data over a meshed wireless network that can be accessed online so that you can get a reasonably accurate idea of where you can find a place to park. The picture above shows how the data can be plugged into Google Maps to display the parking availability on a block-by-block basis. The program uses different kinds of sensors to determine the density of parked cars (though they primarily rely on magnetic sensors), but the actual sensor arrays are small, and the combination of sensors means that they could also be used to relate other types of real-time data like pedestrian density, micro-climate data, and more.

I would pay almost anything to have this information available on my GPS. I cannot tell you how many hours of my time I have wasted trolling for parking, particularly in Harvard Square and its immediate surroundings. Not to mention the number of times I have just bitten the bullet and parked in a permit-only space knowing that there would be a ticket on my windshield when I got back, but having little other choice. The article also mentions that the developers are hoping that they’ll also be able to develop an algorithm that will predict parking availability for some point in the immediate future; say you want to know where you might find a space within a block of your destination sometime between 2:00 and 2:15. Wouldn’t THAT just be the cat’s ass?