Hoping to gain efficiencies in police, utility and maintenance efforts, cities from Portland, Ore., to Philadelphia are planning wireless networks, which will also offer untethered Internet access to citizens.

One especially promising area is parking, where the wireless network movement is joining a new generation of high-tech meters to improve data gathering and increase revenue.

"We see parking as an important part of the public-service tier of services a Wi-Fi network could improve, along with traffic, maintenance and field inspectors," said Houston CIO Richard Lewis, adding that this summer, Houston will become the first major U.S. city to manage its parking meters over a wireless network.

During the past decade, Lewis said, the city's parking-meter systems had not kept pace with growth in the downtown area, which included new sports arenas and a convention center hotel.

"We had all these major investments in downtown, but we didn't have enough parking, and we didn't have parking meters that could take credit cards," he said. "So we began to look at systems that took credit cards and had pay-and-display technology."

Seven vendors responded to the RFP, which was issued in 2004, said Liliana Rambo, assistant director of the city's Department of Parking Management, describing the parking system as a turnkey system the city will be solely responsible for operating. The software will do instant credit card approval online, and the city's back-office operations will handle all credit card processing.

The City Council approved a $15 million deal with Affiliated Computer Services in early April 2006 for a network of 1,500 multiple-space meters -- 750 of which will be installed this summer -- to handle 2,300 downtown parking spaces.

The other 750 will be deployed over the next five years. The meters will be attached to a 60-node mesh network built by the city, said Rambo.

The city's wireless network promises several benefits. First, she said, the city will save money by spending $300,000 to build its own network rather than paying a private vendor $125,000 per year for access to its network.

"Within three years we will have paid less, and we will own the network," she said.

Currently the city only becomes aware of broken meters when citizens call to complain. This will change with the wireless network.

"City parking officials will get alarms if there's a problem with a meter, so they're not going to be down as much," Rambo said.

Older meters must be emptied of cash on a set schedule whether they're full or not. With the new system, an alarm will be sent to the back office when meters reach a certain threshold to alert an enforcement officer to empty it.

The new parking system can also work with handheld devices that alert meter readers when a meter has expired, although Rambo said she hasn't yet chosen that option because she thought it would be taking on too many changes simultaneously. The system also allows users to pay via cell phone, but Rambo said Houston will gradually scale up to that feature.

During the selection process, the city invited all seven vendors to set up meters in seven blocks north of Houston's downtown area, and linked them to a test Wi-Fi network for five to six weeks.

As city staff assessed each system's technical merits, downtown management district staff members interviewed people as they paid for parking using the test meters. Those customer satisfaction reports counted for 20 points of a 100-point rating system that also included technical performance, cost, the vendors' experiences, and operation and maintenance.

"That's the first time I've ever had that type of public input on a government technology acquisition process," Lewis said.


City Shifts Gears
As vendor evaluations proceeded in 2005, city officials