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Smart Sensors On The Road To More Efficient Parking

You turn the wheel hesitantly and crane your neck to look for any available parking down the street. The person behind you honks irritably. Feeling pressured, you impulsively turn onto the side street. As you do, you glimpse a free space on the street you just left — and it’s taken by the time you circle around again. We’ve all been there. City parking can be a nightmare. But if you lived in a city like San Francisco or Los Angeles and had the right app on your phone, you might have found that spot sooner. These cities are using smart parking systems with sensors in the pavement to detect open spaces so that drivers can find available parking spots right from the app. And it helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That’s because drivers looking for parking cause about 10 percent of gasoline emissions. Drivers looking for parking go slowly, which backs up the cars behind them, and that adds up to about 30 percent of all city traffic.

Read the whole story at ScienceLine »

3 comments about "Smart Sensors On The Road To More Efficient Parking".
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  1. R MARK REASBECK from www.USAonly.US , February 10, 2016 at 9:49 a.m.

    I read the whole story.  I just don't get it.  All these tech-nuts want to make sure that every part of our life needs an APP. It's as if we never figured things out until there was an APP to help us get through life.  First , driving is too much of a hassle, we need UNmanned cars.  Next we are too lazy to retreive our car , and so it must come find us UNmanned.  But now we can't deal with parking, so we need someone to find us a parking space , so our car can park itseld, and we don't even know how we got here because we aren't driving our UNmanned Cars.  Take the friggin' bus people , take a cab, or the next great thing, An Unmanned Uber car that never parks.
    The biggest joke in this article  says that these parking APPS have already reduced greenhouse gasses by 25%.. PLEASE SHOW ME DATA HOW YOU ARRIVED AT THIS CONCLUSION.  The wind could blow harder one day and it would effect these stats.  And for you UNmanned car folks, the parking APP is only 86% effective.  Yesterday 2 trains collided in Germany.  Authorities are searching the black boxes to see why all the SAFETY FEATURES FAILED.   When you surrender  your sterring wheel over in the clown cars, do you really feel safe at 86%  effective?    Almost $20 milion for parking spot sensors in SF.  I'd like to see that breakdown of actual  cost of products, labor , but most of all the padding and waste.

  2. L Stevens from LMMS, February 10, 2016 at 3:16 p.m.

    After time overseas, most parking garages in Belgium (+other EU countries) have a lovely, simple little system where "Christmas tree light"-sized bulb(/s?) is/are mounted above each parking stall: green = vacant; red = occupied. 

    Pull into a vacant spot - voila! Green becomes red.

    This was SO efficient when driving in crowded garages. Easy to spot a lone green space amongst a sea of reds VS the usual US-method of craning neck side to side and crawling along, thereby choking anyone in a 20 foot radius with exhaust (or getting stuck driving behind extra-slow spot-seekers.)

    People staring at their phones calculating upcoming spots while crawling along is just as annoying. Plus safety factors - car or ped - can't benefit from more distracted drivers?

    Many US garages already have sensors detecting how many spots are "available" when you pull into garage levels. Maybe I'm crazy, but adding this extra mini-light feature for park-ers seems a no-brainer since the entry sign already confirms whether spaces are available upon entry. 

    Entry sign = availability.  Mini-lights = where. Easy-peasy/ no app nec. 

  3. Judy Mowatt from Freelance Media Buyer, February 11, 2016 at 1:19 a.m.

    Most parking garages I've been in, in Los Angeles, I can't even get a decent WiFi signal. 

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