With a recovery on the horizon, the downtown district is installing new technology to make parking easier, especially on busy Friday and Saturday nights.

It's called Cleverciti. Installation is underway on a network of sensors mounted atop light poles that can identify empty space; not just the 400 ones on the street, but also in seven surface lots and 11 garages.
360-degree LED signs, mounted 20 feet up, display turn-by-turn directions where to find empty spaces and how many are available.

"The real way to find a space is through data, and if you know for sure in which direction you have to turn and there will be parking spaces, you don't need to use just luck anymore," said Thomas Hohenacker, Cleverciti's CEO and president, who spoke to us from its headquarters in Munich, Germany.