Real-Time Street Parking Availability Estimation

Real-time parking availability information is important in urban areas, and if available could reduce congestion, pollution, and gas consumption. In this paper, we present a software solution called PhonePark for detecting the availability of on-street parking spaces. The solution uses the GPS and/or accelerometer sensors in a traveler's mobile phone to automatically detect when and where the traveler parked her car, and when she released a parking slot. PhonePark can also utilize the mobile phone's Bluetooth sensor or piggyback on street parking payment transactions for parking activity detection. Thus, the solution considers only mobile phones and does not rely on any external sensors such as cameras, wireless sensors embedded in the pavements, or ultrasonic sensors on vehicles. Further contributions include an algorithm to compute the historical parking availability profile for an arbitrary street block and algorithms to estimate the parking availability in real-time for a given street block. The algorithms are evaluated using real-time and real world street parking data.