Indianapolis Parking Is Getting Smarter
A couple of weeks ago I was in downtown Indianapolis and had to run into a client’s office real quick to grab something and then head back out. After circle a couple of blocks a few times looking for a parking space I finally found one about a block-and-a-half away. I raided the ash tray for all of my silver change and fed the meter. I thought it would be long enough, but when I returned I had a $20 parking fine left for me underneath my windshield wiper.
As the time I thought that it would have been really great to have a meter that could take a credit card payment, or perhaps even a payment via cellphone in some way.
Turns out, I was only a few weeks behind the times and a couple of streets further away, but from a recent article on the Indy Channel website, my desires have been heard!
“If you are in an office building, and let’s say you park your car here and you’re at the top of one of these buildings, you can use your cell phone to … add time,” Gerig said.
The cell payment option is available yet, but it’s coming. Along with more of these parking pay boxes in other areas of Indianapolis.
I love it!
Seems like this day has been a long time coming. We do so much with our phones, why shouldn’t we be able to be alerted to our time expiring and be able to feed a few more credits into the meter if we’re running longer than expected.
One thing I do wonder is if there would be an overall abuse of that ability. If you could keep pumping money into the meter without returning to your parking spot, that could hinder the “flow” of parking spaces becoming available for others throughout the day.
Source: Pay Boxes Modernize Indianapolis Parking
Photo: sxc.hu
Indianapolis Ranks 44th Among List of Socially Connected Cities
In a recent link shared by Patric Welch of Noobie on Facebook, I discovered that Indianapolis is perhaps not quite as connected as I would have thought compared to other US cities. Indianapolis ranked 44th among Top 100 Socially Networked Cities in the U.S.
Is ranking 44th on the list a surprise to you?
Other cities of note to give you an idea include:
- Washington, DC – #1
- Orlando, FL – #7
- Austin, TX – #8
- Cincinnati, OH – #11
- Las Vegas, NV – #25
- Nashville, TN – #32
- Los Angeles, CA – #33
- Chicago, IL – #39
- New York City, NY – #53
Austin doesn’t surprise me too much as their the home of SXSW every year, perhaps a little lower than I expected. But I guess it shouldn’t count if everyone just connects in your city for a short period of time. With the music industry in Nashville and so many bands and musicians using social media and “networking”, I’d think Nashville would have ranked a little higher than #32.
Our friend Dr. Thomas Ho is doing what he can to further connect the city of Orlando like he did while he was living in Indianapolis, but they’re doing pretty well at #7.
Indianapolis has our tweetups, Smaller Indiana, and of course Blog Indiana. But are they doing what we need? Perhaps you’re asking yourself “Well, how did they measure the cities?” Good question!
It was a combination of determining the amount of people using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter per capita. Then they also added online advertising traffic from sites like MySpace, Friendster, Reddit and Digg. Is that enough? What better ways could they have used?
Regardless of how they ranked Indianapolis, what do you think we should do to try and improve our position? Should we worry about it at all?
Let’s Put Solar Roadways in Indianapolis
I just saw video of a guy that’s invented a solar panel that’s tough enough to be driven on. The entire reason is to replace stupid, heavy asphault with smart roadways that harness that power from the sun and use it to power our neighborhoods. Imagine a parking lot that soaked up the rays of the sun all day to serve as a giant recharge station for all these new electric cars that are going to be hitting the roadways.
Imagine how neat it would be to have a few streets of these new solar roadways installed around the city in time for the Super Bowl in 2012. Take a look at this video and the Solar Roadways website and let me know what you think. Should Indianapolis be a test environment for this new transportation technology?
