SFpark is

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

's system for managing the availability of both on- and off-street parking. Taking effect in April 2011, the program utilizes smart parking meters that change their prices according to location, time of day, and day of the week, with the goal of keeping about 15% of spaces vacant on any given block.High-tech parking meters premiere in S.F
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San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA or San Francisco MTA) is an agency created by consolidation of the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni), the Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT), and the Taxicab Commission. The agen ...

launched the system with congestion mitigation funding from the

Federal Highway Administration The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is a division of the United States Department of Transportation that specializes in highway transportation. The agency's major activities are grouped into two programs, the Federal-aid Highway Program a ...

in July 2010 as a fallback from a downtown cordon.

San Francisco congestion pricing San Francisco congestion pricing is a proposed traffic congestion user fee for vehicles traveling into the most congested areas of the city of San Francisco at certain periods of peak demand. The charge would be combined with other traffic reducti ...

It is one of several such systems in the world. The

City of Calgary Calgary ( ) is the largest city in the western Canadian province of Alberta and the largest metro area of the three Prairie Provinces. As of 2021, the city proper had a population of 1,306,784 and a metropolitan population of 1,481,806, making ...

, Canada and th
Calgary Parking Authority
with thei
ParkPlus
system have been using a similar demand based pricing model since 2008. The system seeks to reduce the time and fuel wasted by drivers searching for an open space.Matt Richtel. NY Times

May 7, 2011. Parking usage is monitored via sensors placed in the asphalt, and the availability and prices can be checked via SFpark.org, iPhone and Android apps, and

cell phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

. Prices can range from a minimum of 25¢ to a maximum of $7 per hour during normal hours, with a $18 per hour cap for special events such as baseball games or street fairs. , prices range from 25¢ to $7.00 per hour during normal hours. In addition to the on-street parking, fourteen city-owned garages are included in the program. This concept of market-based

variable pricing Variable pricing is a pricing strategy for products. Traditional examples include auctions, stock markets, foreign exchange markets, bargaining, electricity, and discounts. More recent examples, driven in part by reduced transaction costs using ...

or "performance parking" has long been advocated by transportation researcher

Donald Shoup Donald Curran Shoup (born August 24, 1938) is an American engineer and professor in urban planning. He is a research professor of urban planning at University of California, Los Angeles and a noted Georgist economist. His 2005 book ''The High Cos ...

, now an adviser on the project.

Results

By December 2012, average hourly parking rates had dropped by 14 cents from $2.73 to $2.59, SFMTA's revenue from parking citations dropped from 45% to 20% of total parking revenue, and 6% of the new meters charged 25¢ an hour. A March 2014 study found that SFpark met its 60–80% occupancy goal and that cruising for parking is down by 50%. A 2016 economic study found a dramatic positive benefit of the SFpark Project: subsequent price changes squeeze more blocks into the target occupancy range of 60–80%, reducing the number of blocks with very high or very low occupancy rates as well as, more generally, the number of blocks not meeting occupancy goals. The study notes that this finding does not mean that the occupancy rate on any particular block is more stable but rather that overall variability in occupancy rates across blocks decreases, on average, through performance-based price changes. If individuals can more reliably and quickly find parking spaces (i.e. if target occupancy rates are met more frequently on aggregate), then each vehicle trip does not need to be padded with additional travel time to "cruise" for a vacant space.

City-wide expansion

The SFpark program was expanded to the entire city's 28,000 parking meters, from the pilot's 7,000 meters, in early 2018. Future rate adjustments for the meters will apply to the entire city.

References

External links

* {{webarchive , url=http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20130104012814/http://sfpark.org/ , title=Official website , date=January 4, 2013
Video explaining the system

Nextdoor offers online forum for neighborhoods

Pay to park: Are residents angry at bureaucratic bungling — or just with the loss of free street parking?

Residents slam proposal for more parking meters
Transportation in San Francisco Transport economics Parking