yes:
See Streetline on this, and the 3-minute video, and Streetline services relevant to this.

The ideal endgoal would certainly be:

1) As a driver, I tell my care where I want to go, it consults the network, and offers me a menu of available spots on the car’s electronic map, including pricing estimates. Maybe it tells me about ones that seem likley to be vacated, if I’m a ways away. Maybe I can “reserve” one. Pricing is dynamic, but I should be able to find out any time from a handheld what it’s costing me.

2) I drive and park, and a parking meter reads the car’s transponder and charges me for the time as I use it. (I.e., the SF Bay Area uses FasTrak for bridges, for example.

BUT: it is impossible to just magically jump to that, because to work, it needs:
- physical infrastructure (sensors, smart meters)
- network infrastructure
- smart vehicles

Hence, this becomes a strong “insertion strategy” issue, in which each step you take has to be be useful and cost-effective for somebody, without requiring *everybody* to do something. For example, people would scream if the only way to get over the Golden Gate were to have FasTrak … so of of course some lanes still take money.

In the parking case, there’s a whole sequence of possible approaches, depending on the city’s preferences, existing infrastructure, etc. One can:

0) No practical solution can depend on every car having some device in it; it takes too long for the installed base to move.

1) Just put sensors down in a “2-hour parking” area, that doesn’t even have meters, and any parking control officers can do what they do now, but without hassle of chalking tires, and with *their* route-sheets better optimized, or even better, handhelds that tell them “3 cars an hour over on next block.”

2) Put sensors in simple metered spaces.

3) Put in smart meters as well, as part of the same wireless mesh.
Then, depending on how smart the meters get about charging, and what they can expect from the cars, and what kinds of sensors they have, you can start approaching the end goal.

Of course, even step 1, with the right network software and support for smartphones, helps drivers find parking. The really key step is starting top build the wireless mesh physical infrastructure out there. Also, once you do that, the mesh turns out to be useful for other things, the same way as the Internet gets used for applications for which no one would ever build the Internet.

For examples, fire hydrants need to be pressure-checked periodically. A fire hydrant with a pressure sensor could easily wake up once a day, and report its pressure to the street mesh, miniscule data.

I hope you don’t mean your own PhD students by this!:
“”"”"”"”I think a dozen quality PhDs in economics could be constructed in Australia on themes developed in Shoup’s book and all would have greater social payoffs than the current batch of mindless atheoretical, time series macroeconomic studies or the surfeit of ’sophisticated’, useless game theory projects we are producing.”"”"”