San Francisco misses the NextBus

In the dog-eat-dog world of San Francisco parking, information is power. My friends Tom and Mary know this. When Tom comes home from work, he calls Mary from the car and Mary goes out to their eighth-floor balcony to scope out the surrounding blocks for parking spaces.

Things may get a bit easier for Tom and Mary over the next few years, though, as the city's transit agency experiments with a new system called SFPark. The city is installing new smart parking meters with wireless sensors that can tell when a parking spot is free. The city wants to share that information with drivers, in theory giving them (or their passengers -- texting while driving is illegal in California!) a way to find a parking spot via their mobile phones.

Brilliant technology, but let's hope that it rolls out a little more smoothly than another cutting-edge system we use here in San Francisco to predict when city buses will arrive. San Francisco is one of several dozen cities that use a system called NextBus.

NextBus is cool, too. It uses a wireless network and GPS to figure out where San Francisco's buses are and, most importantly, how long it will be until the next one shows up at the nearest bus stop.

The problem is that nobody seems to know for sure who owns the data. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) says it's theirs, but Apple disagrees. Last month Apple killed off a cool little iPhone app called Routsey that used the NextBus data and the iPhone's GPS capabilities to direct people to the nearest bus stop and tell them when the next city bus is due.