AI-powered app breaks down SF parking block by block
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Image: Courtesy of Bowen Yin
Ever wished for a cheat code to San Francisco's infamously complex street parking rules? A SF developer's new AI-powered app might have cracked it.
Why it matters: As we all know, parking in the city can be a real headache, circling the same four streets trying to figure out where one can and can't leave their ride.
- It's one of several apps aimed at making parking easier in SF, but the level of detail and scale in the new visualization tool quickly blew up online.
How it works: The new ParkSF app, made by developer Bowen Yin, maps out parking rules, dynamic pricing, meter schedules, street cleaning, occupancy by hour and citations by street in the last 90 days.
- For metered parking, different shades of blue and purple indicate pricing from low to high.
- You can also enter preset settings, such as duration and time of day, to see what's available.
- The data is refreshed every few days to ensure the map stays up to date, Yin told Axios. It's useful for "when you're in the moment trying to find parking but also if you're curious about broader trends," Yin said.
Zoom in: The programmer said he got the idea for the project after he received a parking ticket.
- "SF is like one of the hardest parking cities I've been to," noted Yin, who lives on the border of SoMa and Hayes Valley. "It seems there are so many regulations and rules."
- The parking app he previously used was convoluted and relied on outdated data, so he began poking around public data published by the city.
- "Basically, there's like a dataset for every aspect of parking," he said. "I fed all of that into Claude and asked it to process it for me, and then I created the visualization ... and just tried to interweave the data to represent each block of the city."
The parking ticket/citations data "is probably the most dynamic," he added. It's certainly made a splash on Reddit.
The intrigue: Several trends stood out to Yin as he put together the website.
- "For one thing, the parking prices can get really expensive in some places," he noted. "For metered parking like in the Marina or on Polk Street, it goes up to $11 an hour."
- He also found the number of tow-away blocks surprisingly high. "A really big chunk of downtown, you just can't park there at all during the day," he said.
The big picture: Past apps have tried to track where parking tickets are issued in close to real time, but some of those data sources were later pulled by the city to protect parking enforcement operations.
- Because his map relies on data published after a day, "this one's probably safer," Yin said. San Franciscan drivers likely hope so.