Young drivers in San Francisco are probably baffled by tales of the old days, when people had to scrounge for quarters to pay for parking.
Today, we “feed the meter” through our phones, a payment method that makes the food analogy a little more confusing, and the process a lot more convenient. According to leaders at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, it just got even easier.
Officials at SFMTA have launched a suite of “smart” parking management tools, including online booking for garages and two new payment apps, HotSpot and ParkMobile. These innovations enable people to find and pay for curb space via their smartphones, without ever having to whip out a credit card, dig their pockets for loose change or touch a physical kiosk. If parking in a dense city had previously been a source of low-level anxiety, it’s become another illustration of a frictionless lifestyle…