Government Technology - November 2008 - (Page 46)

e-gov j j Synopsis: The high-tech parking world is still in the testing phase, but it’s yielding results that the public sector could capitalize on. S TAT E | L O C A L | F E D E R A L Agencies: A Better Way to t’s afternoon, the air is warm and a grayish haze tints the horizon in the distance. Through your windshield you see the rear end of a sedan — the first in a long line of vehicles inching their way down the highway. A look out your side windows and in the rearview mirror shows that you’re surrounded by other drivers. You sigh and wait for traffic to move. Slowly, maddeningly, it does. You finally arrive at a city-owned parking lot, but soon realize you are no better off. All of the parking spaces are occupied. This is a story people in many large and mid-sized cities may identify with. Congested streets, rush-hour stagnation, hapless drivers — all are unpleasant byproducts of modern metropolitan living. At least for now. Public-sector forces in California’s San Francisco Bay Area are working to alleviate the problem by deploying wireless parking technology that informs people of parking space availability while they’re driving or even before they get in their vehicles. These high-tech parking experiments are conducted with a few prominent goals in mind, including making it easier for drivers to hunt down spaces in today’s urban jungles. One example is a lengthy test conducted at the Rockridge Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in Oakland, Calif., from December 2004 to spring 2006. This collaborative endeavor, which included the California Department of Transportation and researchers from the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, used high-tech gadgets to create a smart-parking management field test. Smart-parking devices help people find and pay for spaces. People used the technology to navigate an area of about B Y H I LT O N C O L L I N S | S TA F F W R I T E R Park California’s wireless parking technology experiments could take the pain out of rush hour commuting. 50 spaces at the Rockridge station as part of the test. “We enabled people to make reservations via the Internet prior to the parking event,” said Susan Shaheen, a researcher from California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways at UC Berkeley. “We also encouraged people to get off the highway on their way to work by providing them with real-time availability information via changeable message signs during peak commute hours.” Ground-mounted wireless sensors collected vehicular information in the parking lot through magnetic-imaging technology. San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit, California Department of Transportation, California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highway, University of California at Berkeley. Technologies: Internet, wireless connectivity and handheld devices. Contact: Bob Justice, project manager, California Department of Transportation, bob_justice@dot. ca.gov. I NOV_08 This information was transmitted in real time to an electronic information network over the Internet that allowed the data to be viewed by drivers on their cell phones, computers, ground-mounted changeable message signs or other devices. Drivers could also use cell phones or PDAs to reserve spaces. Users could also reserve spaces through an interactive voice response system, known as Kate. “The core technology is the parking information network, and we’ve developed that,” said Rick Warner, CEO of ParkingCarma, the company that supplied the project’s network that collected vehicular information from 46 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - November 2008

Government Technology - November 2008 Contents Point of View On the Scene Big Picture Four Questions for … Forward Thinkers Taking Tech Home Virtual Frontier Hidden Costs Uncovered Seeing Red For the Record In the Loop Benign Dictatorship Home-Field Advantage A Better Way to Park New Tools for Fighting Crime How It Works Spectrum Products Two Cents signal:noise

Government Technology - November 2008

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