Urban Mobility 2011: Driving and Parking

Thanks for the comment, and you are right, we need more companies to get on board with this technology.

Parking a major concern for most drivers in urban areas. Do you think this technology would work in a heavily congested area like NYC or Los Angeles?

Some second thoughts on this...

I think the first targets for this may be theme parks like Disney. They have the cash and incentive to make their visitors happier. If a person entering the park enters after 2 hours of searching for a parking spot and fighting with others to get one, the park is worse of as a whole.

As I recall, Washington D.C. has no ability to tax residents, so they get all their revenue from parking tickets. They would hate this idea.

Also it didn't make the report so they may not have thought of it, but a clever application of the sensors in a parking lot entrance/exit would be able to calculate risk reward ratio for potential parkers. If their are 6 available slots, and the sensors have detected 7 new cars had entered the lot, their is no reward for the risk of another entrant, even though 2 of the cars in the lot are not going to park but merely pick up a waiting party.

Those are some great caveats you point out about this system, and I wonder too if the designers and architects have considered these issues. What would you suggest as a way around the 6 spots 7 cars problem?

I was thinking of 3 sensors in a row in the bottleneck of every entrance or exit from a confined parking garage or lot. They would be spaced about 1 meter apart or maybe 4 feet.

Software would be written for listening to these special ones to register the pattern of an entering vehicle by a pattern of 1 on, 2 on, 3 on, 1 off, 2 off, 3 off. The software listening to these special entrance way sensors would simply count up or down based on the number of cars that went over it going inward or outward. I know it's no easy trick cause of the potential to miscount, like when a car tailgates another through the threshold, high speed crossing, or if a really short car goes over, or a motorcycle bypasses them, or even when a person pulls a trailer through, etc.

Since the sensors at every parking space know the stationary cars above them, they also know the remaining parking spots, and the entrance sensors know how many cars should be in the lot by the net crossings count. That balance would be programmed to send a signal back to an LED Marquis near the entrance showing the level of available parking including the spots that are soon to go. Maybe it could be a red dot for each full spot, yellow dot for every car not parked, and green dots for the amount that should certainly be open.

Agree