People are ga-ga over San Francisco's plan to install wireless sensors at 6,000 metered parking spaces (about one-quarter of the city's total), alerting drivers whenever one becomes open.
Some smart guy probably figured, "hey, we can do this for finding the nearest Starbucks, why not parking spaces?"
I'm finally getting around to this, because I read one too many wide-eyed admiring account of this scheme. Surely, the flaws should be obvious.
The sensors register when a car leaves the space, and upload that information to a server, which will then alert drivers to the vacancy via electric street signs, or maps on their cell phone screens. And you might even be able to pay for the space from that same cell phone!
No endless circling the block, or several blocks, vainly searching and vainly hoping that a metered space will miraculously appear a car length in front of you. John Markoff's NY Times story cites apalling estimates on the how many miles and hours and gallons of gasoline are wasted doing this.
And...you can expect lower crime, like...no murders. Markoff notes that two years ago a San Francisco teenager was stabbed to death in a fight over a parking space.
Although, no one in the story explains how the wireless network actually will make fights LESS likely.
In fact, I'm pretty sure it will make fights more likely, and increase reckless driving. That's because now a much larger group of people in a given area will no longer have to hope that an extremely scarce, monopolized, fixed-price resource is open on their route. Now, they'll KNOW it's open; they'll know exactly where it is, and exactly where they are; and they'll know that the only way to get it will be to drive like hell.
Markoff quotes the executive of the company supplying the wireless sensor technology as making the quite reasonable point that sensor networks can become like an operating system, in this case one that lets you "talk to or control all the inanimate objects out there to reduce the cost and improve the quality of city services."
Well. Who could argue with that?
Except the technology does not and cannot control the animate objects -- people, who are being encouraged to see "information" as a morality-free entitlement that exists mainly for self-indulgence. And first dibs on an open parking spot.
If someone was really interested in a radical solution to downtown parking problems, they'd figure out a way to create a wireless real-time auction of available parking spaces, and let the market do what it does best: sort out a scarce resource.
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Cox is a senior editor at Network World.
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