Searching for Parking? Try Online
By Dan Orzech Wired News June 2006
The internet might soon be the best place to snag a parking spot in a busy city.
Several companies are experimenting with systems that let drivers go online or even use cell phones and handheld devices to reserve a space in a garage or locate nearby street parking. And a unique social-networking service might break open the whole circle-and-search game by letting homeowners rent out unused driveways.
"The technology for finding parking places online is available now -- it's just a matter of deploying it," says Tod Dykstra, founder and CEO of one of those companies, San Francisco-based Streetline Networks. "Soon, parking will be the easiest part of the driving in the city."
You can already go online to reserve a spot in certain garages, but web-enabled parking is about to spread across the United States:
- This summer, drivers in the 30 largest U.S. cities will be able to use their cell phones to check which garages have space available, make a reservation and get directions. The company providing the service, Maryland-based MobileParking, currently tracks availability by calling garages.
- In Oakland, California, Bay Area Rapid Transit just finished a test of a system that used sensors embedded in a parking lot to keep track of available spaces. Commuters could reserve those spots online or by phone, while electronic signs next to a nearby highway let motorists know how many spots were open at any given time. BART is now evaluating whether to expand the system, which is also being considered by San Diego and other cities.
- Similar technology helps drivers locate parking places at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, where ultrasonic sensors monitor the 8,400 parking spaces in the airport's daily garage. When a space becomes free, it's marked with an easy-to-see green light. Rows with open parking places have a green arrow at the end and a display showing how many spaces are left. When a row fills up, its arrow turns red.
- Near Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, small wireless sensors at 250 parking spots tell the city when a space is occupied. Since the data is available in web-friendly form, making it available to motorists will be straightforward, according to Dykstra, whose company is developing the technology. San Francisco is evaluating the sensors for three months; Streetline Networks, meanwhile, says it is talking with nearly a dozen other cities about the technology.
With urban planners estimating that motorists searching for parking spots are responsible for up to 30 percent of downtown traffic, the new services are likely to make life much easier for city dwellers who've become numb to the endless circling.
And there are other benefits as well. Streetline's system yields data about parking patterns that is far more detailed than can be gleaned by simply counting the quarters in parking meters. San Francisco is thrilled to get its hands on the information, since only 5.4 percent of parking violations in the city result in income-generating tickets, according to a recent study.
But meter maids and parking citations may soon become obsolete, according to Dykstra, as Streetline's technology makes it possible for cities to offer drivers the option of paying for parking on the web or by cell phone. If you're commuting, he says, "you might park, and then go to your office, pay by credit card, and be paid up until you leave. When you drive away, the space knows you left, and it sends you a receipt by e-mail. Parking tickets will be a historical footnote."
Possibly the most innovative idea for helping drivers park their cars comes from SpotScout, a Massachusetts company that is creating an online marketplace where people can trade information about available parking places and even rent out their own driveways.
"You can't purchase or sell public space," says SpotScout founder and CEO Andrew Rollert, but you can use cell phones and handheld devices to trade information about when and where a spot will be available.
A driver about to give up a parking place on the street can use SpotScout to make that information available to other motorists who are hunting for a spot in the area. With that knowledge, says Rollert, "you'll pull over and put your blinker on, and someone will walk up, get in the car, and drive away. It's almost like you had ESP for when somebody was actually going to leave the spot."
SpotScout, which is free to join and has no monthly fees, only charges drivers when they actually pull into a spot. The company takes a small percentage of each transaction, using a PayPal-like system to deposit the rest into the accounts of people who are leaving a spot or renting out their own.
The parking place doesn't have to be on the street. City dwellers who are not using their driveways -- for example, when they're at work or out of town -- can use SpotScout to make the space available to others by the hour or day.
The service will launch in San Francisco, Boston and New York in July. Already, more than 800,000 people have signed up -- half of them with parking places to offer, according to Rollert. By fall, SpotScout expects to make parking space information available on portable navigation systems.
With the U.S. Department of Transportation calculating that there are more than 243 million vehicles on U.S. roads, SpotScout, and the other approaches taking parking online, are coming none too soon.
"The parking situation in cities is already bad, and it's going to get worse," Rollert says. "Everyone hates looking for parking. But within the next three years, you -- or your car -- should always know where there's a parking place." |
