Some cool map-related items:

San Francisco’s Parking Census – with one of those ideas that’s so obvious that no one ever thought of it before, San Francisco has completed the first known census of all the publicly available parking spaces in an American city.  The census found 441,541 spaces in the city, just 280,000 of which are on-street spaces – occupying an area comparable to the city’s Golden Gate Park.

The release of the public parking space census coincides with the redesign of the website for SFPark, an occupancy-based parking management trial funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant, which among many objectives, seeks to manage the supply of parking by adjusting the cost to match demand. To put that in laymen’s terms, if SFPark works well, there should be enough parking at the curb so that drivers don’t have to circle the block endlessly searching for that elusive space. By gradually adjusting the price of parking up or down in the pilot areas, the city expects to create roughly one or two free spaces per block face at any time, the original purpose of parking meters when they were introduced in the 1930s.

Jay Primus, who directs the SFPark trial for the MTA, said the parking census was the first step toward a better understanding of how parking works in San Francisco, filling a void where city planners could only make rough estimates previously. “If you can’t manage what you can’t count, doing a careful survey and documenting all publicly available parking was a critical first step for the MTA for how we manage parking more intelligently,” he said.

The importance of this data, especially to this level of detail, cannot be understated.  Applying this type of information to performance pricing systems is just one potential application.   The study’s accompanying PDF map shows just how detailed and granular the data is:

Each dot along the streets represents a meter, the larger circles within blocks represent off-street parking.   Garages and non-metered street spaces with less than 25 spaces per block aren’t even shown.

The real Census also has some cool maps – the Census Bureau’s Take 10 map allows you to see real time (relatively speaking) response rates by census tract for DC:

Currently, DC’s response rate stands at 44%.  Tract 4902, highlighted above, is only at 39%.