Better Farmer’s Market parking is coming.
May 14th, 2009I love the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market, but anyone who drives a car to patronize it will tell you that parking is a major pain - especially since they shut down the parking lot to the north of the Ferry Building. Yes, there are other lots, but I find myself circling the area in hope of finding a closer metered space.
However finding a space is just part of the problem. I rarely have enough change to pay for the hour’s worth of parking I really need for my usual Saturday morning excursion. And sometimes I wish I could buy even more time so I could get a meal and shop, for example.
So I was pleased to learn (from one of the lovely women at the Golden Gate Meat Company) that the metered parking situation is about to change, hopefully for the better. A new city program, SFPark, is slated to begin a prepilot phase along the Embarcadero this month, replacing today’s meters with smart meters that not only can take credit cards (in addition to coins and San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Authority cards) but will support longer parking intervals.
In researching the parking meter upgrades, I learned that the same program will also collect and provide (via the web and text messages) real-time information on parking availability at meters and city garages. Finally, SFPark will use variable pricing to attempt to redistribute parking, so that, for example, you’d pay more at a meter on a block with high demand than you would at a meter on a block that typically has empty spaces.
Not hard-core foodie news, but definitely SanFran. It might still be tough to find an empty space on a Saturday morning, but at least if I do I can actually pay for it, whether or not I happen to have lots of quarters.
