With the rise of the high-powered mobile phones, some innovative urban planners in San Francisco are hoping to use the success of these new gadgets to deploy a parking system that is truly smarter and will reduce stress and conflicts. 

Smartphones, such as the popular iPhone, the HTC Touch, Blackberries, and the Verizon Voyager currently have about 10 percent market share in the mobile phone market.  However, their market share is growing fast and is expected to triple by 2013 according to some estimates.

The developers are hoping to take advantage of this and are installing a wireless sensor network, consisting of sensors and transmitters housed safely under small hard plastic tabs.  The network will cover 6,000 of San Francisco's 24,000 parking spots as a trial deployment.  Citizens can find spots in two ways.  First special street signs will point to free spaces.  Secondly, the city will offer free service to smart phones which display free spots on city maps.

For even greater convenience, customers can pay their parking from their smartphone, worry free.

Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, is very hopeful about the experiment.  He helped pioneer much of the new thinking in modern parking theory and helped to the research to justify the adoption.  He stated, "If the San Francisco experiment works, no one will have to murder anyone over a parking space.  It will have a cascade of positive effects on transportation and the economy and environment."

While San Francisco leads the way, as many as a dozen other cities are in talks about adopting similar smart phone based sensor network systems for parking.  New York City is not going to be one of them as its plans died in the state legislature.  However, the high-gas prices are relieving the situation slightly by lowering traffic. 

Many argue that for New York City hoping that gas prices will solve the problem is wishful thinking.  Transportation Alternatives, a public transit advocacy group recently released a study stating that 28 percent to 45 percent of traffic on some streets in New York City is generated by people circling the blocks waiting for a spot.  In just the 15 block area studied, drivers put 366,000 extra miles on their car a year looking for a spot.

Gavin Newsom, San Francisco's mayor, is proud his city is taking a more proactive approach.  He has long argued that his city's traffic system is antiquated and severely in need of updating.  He said, "When I watch the movie ‘Vertigo,’ I still recognize every single traffic signal." 

He said the network is a good solution as it helps citizens without imposing restrictions like tolls, which can negatively affect.

The SFPark system, as the new network is called, is part of a two-year $95.5M USD effort from San Francisco.  By making parking quicker, it hopes to give a boost to the city's economy by lengthening the amount of time customers have to shop and eat.  The project aims for no more than 85 percent of spots to be occupied.  It is estimated that 30 percent of the traffic in commercial areas currently is people looking for a spot.

Professor Shoup estimated that in just one small business district, parking waste accounted for the equivalent of 38 trips around the world, burning 47,000 gallons of gasoline and producing 730 tons of carbon dioxide.

The new system will be produced by Streetline, a small tech startup.  In uses a sensor tech known as "smart dust" developed at the University of California, Berkley.  The system consists of a series of the 4 by 4-inch sensors inside plastic casings, which relay information on parking spot occupation and traffic speed to a central computer.  The plastic unit is known as a "bump" and is battery powered and designed to last 5 to 10 years without maintenance. 

Streetline will also be deploying the technology to communicate the parking information with wireless devices like smartphones.  San Francisco also hopes to deploy more sensors to enrich the network and detect things such as gunshots or pollution. 

Tod Dykstra, chief executive of Streetline remarked, "The broader picture is what we’re building is an operating system for the city that allows you to talk to or control all the inanimate objects out there to reduce the cost and improve quality of city services.  There isn’t a person who hasn’t experienced the travails of going around the block multiple times searching for a parking space, using gas and wasting time and generating greenhouse gases.  It will scale in people’s consciousness to the point that the public will demand more."

San Francisco is also set to become a new leader in consumer solar power, thanks to an ambitious grant program.  The city has been aggressively looking to go high tech with a broad variety of efforts.