If you think parking in your town is a pain in the ass, visit London. The city is split into 32 boroughs, each of which has its own set of parking rules. The borough of Islington, for example, is home to the Arsenal soccer team. On game days, Islington’s parking rules totally change to make room for the thousands of fans that stream into Emirates Stadium. Even on non game days, the parking rules are a jumble of restrictions. “Different parking bays have different rules at different times for different people,” says Tim Smith, a designer at London digital studio Ustwo.
It’s true. All told, once you consider the 16 types of permits, the special parking bays, and all of the parking holidays, Islington has nearly 200 permutations of rules that are usually communicated through daunting (and confusing) street signs. “People do not understand the parking rules,” Smith says. “It’s a minefield.”
In London, up to 30 percent of traffic congestion can be blamed on people looking for parking. It’s resulting in a trickle-down mobility problem---the more people looking for parking, the worse the traffic and the higher the emissions. “It’s also one of the major turnoffs in car ownership,” says Doug Nicoll, GoPark's project lead at Ford of Europe. To mitigate all those factors, last year Ford tapped Ustwo to help the company rethink what parking could look like in London. Their idea is GoPark, an app that tells drivers exactly where they can park on any day, at any time.
The premise of GoPark is simple. Using an algorithm, the app (still in beta testing) distills all of Islington's convoluted parking rules down to three pieces of information: Can you park here? If so, for how long? And how much will it cost? The app’s interface shows a street map with your car’s location, which is found using the phone’s GPS or an internet-connected dongle that plugs into the car’s on-board diagnostic port. A green or red overlay visually denotes if you can park in a location (green is yes, red is no). If you can park in a location the app will say, “You can park here till 6:30 pm,” and then tell you how much it will cost you. If the space is off limits, the app will simply state, “You can’t park here until 6:30 pm.” A week-view grid gives a broader overview of parking rules for people who want to plan ahead.
GoPark is attempting to be a simplified yet dynamic alternative to reading physical parking signs. Complicated signs, Nicoll explains, are a product of supply and demand. “There’s a fixed asset in terms of number of places to park,” he says. Eventually, capacity gets outstripped by the number of people who want to park, so in an attempt at fairness, and to keep traffic circulating, city officials implement regulations that determine who gets to use the parking space and when. “It does go wrong” he says. “Five feet of rules is pretty crazy, right?”
GoPark’s value is directly tied to its clarity. But clarity means different things to different people. While developing the app, Nicoll realized that there are multiple kinds of parkers. “You’d think most people park the same,” he says. “Well actually they don’t.” Ford relied on consumer research conducted by Livework1, a service design firm based in London, to divide drivers into four camps: confident, timid, proactive, and planner. Ustwo designed the app around the insight that some people plan ahead while others simply hope for the best when parking. Those who are more timid planners, like to look ahead. “We found that simply telling them, ‘yes you can park here,’ wasn’t enough for them,” says Harsha Vardhan, an interaction designer at Ustwo. "They didn’t trust the app enough yet to take that as guaranteed.” Ustwo and Ford created a week-view calendar and layered on location information as a way to reaffirm drivers they were in the right location and that they could, in fact, park in a bay.
GoPark is among the first projects created in Ford’s new Smart Mobility branch, a subsidiary that is investing in mobility services, autonomous vehicles, and data and analytics. That GoPark is among the first projects to come out of Smart Mobility is an acknowledgement that cities have a long way to go if they're going to catch up to the sophistication of auto technology. Ford, like other automakers, is looking to a future where cars drive themselves. But urban infrastructure---including parking infrastructure---is bursting at the seams, in tandem with a boom in automobile efficiency. Something like GoPark is a small step toward relieving some of that pressure.
The first release of GoPark will focus on clarifying parking rules, but the project has bigger ambitions. Nicoll says eventually Ford will integrate seamless payment options, so that drivers can pay the meter directly from the app. It also has plans to create a SMS service, so that people without smartphones can text their car to do simple tasks like check how much time is left on the meter. Perhaps Ford’s biggest ambition is to build a system that will tell drivers not just whether they can park in a space, but where they can park. To that end, Ford is working with IBM to develop an algorithm that, based on historical and real-time data, can predict when a parking bay is most likely to be open. The teams are still in the testing and data-gathering phase, but Ford envisions a future where cities could implement dynamic smart pricing that encourages drivers to park in less busy parts of the city.
There are, of course, challenges to implementing a predictive parking feature. It takes parking permit data to a whole new level, and Ford would have to ensure that the algorithm doesn’t direct drivers to the same spot. Not to mention the process of scaling the whole thing beyond Islington to the entirety of London (and eventually other cities). Still, it’s a practical---and frankly, long overdue---vision for improving the efficiency of one of driving’s major pain points. “This is going to change everything about parking in London,” Vardhan says. “It’s mental.”
1 UPDATE 02:45 PM ET 03/16/16: Ford worked with Livework to investigate consumer parking behaviors and needs, not UsTwo.
