San Francisco Parklets Provide New Public Waysides

First there were parklets, clearings placed on top of parking spaces. Then there was the Powell Street Promenade, a set of eight aluminum eddies that widen San Francisco’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfare.

Now say hello to “parkmobiles” - portable landscapes in red steel bins 6 feet wide and 16 feet long, intended as a shot of mobile nature offering passers-by visual relief from asphalt and concrete. There will be six such pieces arrayed on blocks around Yerba Buena Gardens, each with a different horticultural theme.

“We want each one to be showy and eye-catching, but also easy to maintain,” said Calder Gillin of CMG Landscape Architecture, which conceived the bins for the Yerba Buena Community Benefit District.

This isn’t simply the latest twist on the parklet theme, which in the past year has moved from the city’s bohemian edge to its downtown core. The parkmobiles signal San Francisco’s most ambitious effort yet to improve the large, urban landscape in small, fluid ways - an effort set, tellingly, in a district that symbolizes old-school urban renewal.

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Enter Streetline, a 30-employee company in San Francisco that creates and installs wireless sensor networks to monitor parking spaces. Each sensor uses a magnetometer to detect the presence of large metal objects nearby.

“If the sensor is within two or three feet of the car, it will register a huge increase in metal,” explains Zia Yusuf, 45, the company’s chief executive. “When the metal content suddenly drops, we know a car left.”

The sensors communicate wirelessly, signaling whether spots are occupied or vacant, gradually collecting data to reveal local parking patterns. That information allows cities to price their parking spaces according to their actual value, factoring in supply and demand as they would with any other piece of real estate.

With that data, cities can both help ease congestion and boost their meter revenue.

Streetline charges its clients a monthly usage fee of $25 to $30 per sensor. The fee covers installation, maintenance and management of the software that collects and distributes parking data. The company does not publicly disclose financial information, but Yusuf says that Streetline is now raising its second round of funding and expects to see its annual revenue rise by 75% for 2011.

“I think this technology will transform urban transportation,” says Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.

He cautions, however, that city governments are rarely early adopters, and signing them up as clients typically involves many bureaucratic headaches.

So far Streetline has set up networks in areas including parts of Los Angeles, Roosevelt Island in New York City, the parking lots at Fort Totten Metro station in Washington, D.C., and a garage at the conference center in Salt Lake City’s Temple Square. The company has also released an iPhone application called Parker, which shows drivers how many parking spots are available on blocks within the sensor network. An Android version is in development.

Source: Wireless Sensor Networks

via smarterplanet: