What's Important?
It's Better For Everyone.
The City of San Rafael, using the new parking sensors, can now collect and utilize information related to transportation and parking -- making better, more informed decisions in the policy making process.
First, the question the Citizens of the City of San Rafael have to ask “Is the current transportation and parking policy the best policy?”
A policy that best serves its citizens, businesses and organizations?
If the answer is “No. We can craft a better parking/transportation policy.” then we have to ask ourselves, as a community, what is the best method for crafting a better parking and transportation policy?
“Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.”
-WhiteHouse.gov
Surprisingly, a step that is often overlooked in the public policy decision making process, is asking ourselves what information and data is available to us and how can we better understand that information, so the public policy we vote into law is informed, factual and accurate.
Thankfully, with the emergence of the Internet (Era of Information) and readily available (Open Source) technologies we can more quickly and efficiently incorporate, analyze and understand mountains of data, so when it’s time to draft public policies we can do so with an accurate map.
In other words, as more information and data becomes available to Citizens and Governments, we can begin making informed, data-driven decisions, based off of real-world information. Pretty cool huh ;)
The Power of Information & Analytics
The City of San Rafael new parking policy is $1.50/hr, but how can we tell if the current policy is the best policy? Well… until recently, it was actually kind of difficult to quantify and measure the current policy, because it would take an enormous amount of resources to gather the information -- let alone analyze the data and understand it in a meaningful way.
That being said, now that a majority (citation needed) of the paid street parking spots in the City of San Rafael are equipped with sensors, we can now much more easily (compared to the pre-sensor era) analyze the results of current policy and see what’s working, what’s not working and what we can change to work better.
Below are several examples of different policies to demonstrate the idea of A/B testing.
Now that data is being collected we can actually test different parking policies and analyze the data to see what policy is best for Citizens, Shoppers, Businesses and Organizations.
Policy A
- $1.50/hr
- 2 Hour Limit
- Guaranteed Ticket if Meter is Unpaid
Policy B
- $0.50/hr
- 1 Hour Limit
- No Ticket With Open Spaces In Front & Behind Vehicle
Policy C
- $1.00/hr
- 3 Hour Limit
- No Ticket With Open Spaces Either In Front or Behind Vehicle
Tell Us What You Think
Together we can create public policies that are better for everyone, but to start the process we first have to understand each other. Fill out the survey and tell us your thoughts on the transportation and parking policies in the City of San Rafael.
Have an idea about how we can make parking better for downtown businesses?
Do you think the data collected using public funds should be made available in usable formats?
Are you discouraged from shopping in San Rafael, because it’s a hassle to find parking?
Let us know in the survey -- We're going to share the results with the City of San Rafael.
