Find a Parking Space Online

San Francisco to implement nation's largest network for monitoring parking.

ByABC News
July 24, 2008, 4:01 PM

July 26, 2008 — -- This fall, San Francisco will implement the largest mesh network for monitoring parking to date. Around 6,000 wireless sensors from the San Francisco company Streetline will be fixed alongside as many parking spots, monitoring both parking availability and the volume and speed of passing traffic. The city hopes that displaying information from the sensors on Web maps, smart phones, and signs on the street will reduce the traffic and pollution caused by circling cars.

A mesh network differs from a typical wireless network in that there's no central transmitter: every node can transmit to every other node. Mesh networks have generally been used for environmental monitoring, or to grant wireless devices Internet access.

When sensor networks have been deployed roadside, it's usually been to monitor traffic, not parking. In urban areas, traffic-monitoring systems have been used for congestion pricing: during business hours in downtown London, for instance, the license plates of cars are photographed, and the drivers are sent a bill. Some parking garages also have signs that tell drivers where the available spaces are, but such systems generally rely on manual car counting, not sensors.

In San Francisco, however, clusters of plastic-encased, networked sensors are embedded in the surface of the street. The main sensor in the cluster, which is commonly used to detect cars, is a magnetic one, says Jim Reich, the vice president of engineering at Streetline. Magnetic sensors detect when a large metal object locally disrupts Earth's magnetic field. One challenge with magnetic sensors is avoiding false positives. "We rely on the magnet the most, but in order to fix errors, we use other types of sensors [that] give you much higher reliability," says Reich. He won't elaborate on the supporting sensors, but he says that the Streetline system has 97 to 99 percent accuracy in recognizing parked cars.

To relay information, the Streetline sensors use Dust Networks' SmartMesh system, a spinoff of the Smart Dust project at the University of California, Berkeley, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. Dust Networks CEO Joy Weiss says that SmartMesh networks are more than 99.99 percent reliable. The nodes can operate for an average of 10 years on two AA batteries before needing a replacement. "We were really the first ones able to build an entire network where every node in the network is able to run on batteries for years, and at the same time deliver very high reliability," says Weiss. "In most [other networks], these are a trade-off."