The current tech boom is driven partly by location-based apps over mobile devices, or what you might call a Lomo push that employs a lot of coders in Somo and elsewhere around San Francisco.
And the City itself recently decided to join the party by releasing its SFpark, an iPhone, iPod, and iPad app designed to help you find parking places on the streets or in the city's parking garages.
Early reviews from users were decidedly mixed.
"It works at last, and is phenomenal. Surprisingly it maps everywhere I need, and is completely accurate," says mhlester on the city's website.
"It crashes the phone and makes it reboot every time I try to launch it," writes Editthisdghyxdsddjvnjk.
Weswag reports: "Crashes repeatedly, so I wasn't able to even see if it helped me find a parking space. I have serious doubts, however. In my experience living in SF for many years, parking spaces on the street in highly congested areas remained open only briefly, and the only way to snag one was to spot people getting into their cars to leave. The info re this app stated that there was a one-minute delay before the data about an empty space was uploaded to the server. Parking spaces are long gone in that amount of time."
According to Matt Richtel of the New York Times, "San Francisco’s is by far the most widespread approach that several cities, universities and private parking garages are experimenting with."
The app depends on a network of wireless sensors that have been embedded in streets and city garages. These sensors report if a spot has opened up.
Hmmm. I guess one thing that is worrisome about this otherwise very cool-sounding project is that many drivers already seem dangerously distracted while talking on their phones or texting while driving.
So couldn't it be somehow integrated into your car's GPS system?
Or, better yet, all of these new digital that are making their way into our cars suggest to me that it's time to take a serious look at Stanford researcher Sebastian Thrun's self-driving car.
By doing as Thrun has proven can be done, and inserting robotics into our vehicles, we could probably substantially reduce the hazards of auto accidents caused by human error -- which are the cause of the overwhelming majority of such accidents, of course.
But I wonder when and if Americans, with our oft-cited "love of the automobile" and our romantic image of taking roadtrips on the open highway, will ever be able to turn the wheel over to a technology that can handle these tasks better than we can.
Of course, one would expect there to be robot errors, from time to time, and this brings up another characteristic that seems deeply ingrained in our culture -- fear of robotic technologies.
Just think of all the books and movies from iRobot to Battlestar Galactica, that are predicated on our fears, and then try to find some with a more hopeful approach?
But to bring it all back to this week's news, SFpark, I can't help but wonder whether most people around here might be happy to at least turn the vexing task of parallel parking on hilly, crowded city streets over to a robot perfectly programmed to execute this maneuver successfully every single time.
A combination of these technologies might even eventually revive those happy-face smiles on the models playing families on road trips back in the 1950s.
Then again, there might arise a new threat -- robot road rage...but I'm sure that someone in the world of sci-fi has already imagined that one, too.
Thank you to Louis Rossetto for suggesting that I look into robotics and Thrun's self-driving car.
