Parking

Scammers Are Using QR Codes to Plunder Parking Meter Payments

The scam has hit several major Texas cities already.

Aerial Footage of a Trucker’s Masterful Parking Skills Is the Most Satisfying Thing to Watch

Have you ever felt like you deserved the Nobel Prize in trigonometry after successfully parallel parking your compact car? Sadly, your skills can’t hold a candle to this truck-driving Jedi who squeezes a full tractor trailer into an impossibly narrow spot without a scratch. The drone’s eye view of the maneuver makes the driver’s skills…

Here’s Our Closest Look at Alphabet’s Plans for the City of the Future

The smart city is on the horizon, and if Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs has anything to do with it, it’ll have subsidized ride-sharing, “Airbnb for cars,” and AI that helps parking cops fine the most people. We’ve long known that Sidewalk, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, is working on the “city of the future.” It…

San Francisco Still Owes Steve Jobs $174 for Overpaid Parking Tickets

It turns out Steve Jobs’ legacy isn’t all rounded corners and chamfered edges: he also (accidentally) bequeathed the San Fransisco Municipal Transit Authority $174 in overpaid parking fines. He’s not alone—the SFMTA is trying to return $6 million in overpaid fines dating back to 1995. According to NBC, the SFMTA had chronic problems from 1995…

#BlackFridayParking Highlights Just How Much of the US Is Wasted on Parking Lots

A quick survey of any big-box store will show you that Americans devote far too much real estate to the parking of their vehicles. But wait, argue businesses, we need that parking for our customers! Yet even today, on the biggest shopping day of the year, chances are the parking lots near you are nowhere…

More Cities Are Blocking the App That Helps You Fight Parking Tickets

Parking tickets suck. Sometimes, you break the law and you deserve it. But other times, signs are missing or incorrect, so you end up with a fine for nothing. That’s why Fixed released an app last year that helped your fight the tickets in court. Some city governments aren’t having it. Fixed is now blocked…

Street Parking Won’t Be a Chore When Your BMW Finds Spots For You

A full third of all vehicular congestion in cities is estimated to be caused by people circling—and circling… and circling… and circling—as they look for parking. A new tool that will be onboard all new BMWs will aggregate real-time data to point drivers towards potential parking spaces and away from inevitable parking headaches. On-Street Parking,…

LA’s New Parking Signs Are Brilliant and Every City Should Copy Them

In the quest to make parking suck less, there are apps that help you find a space, and meters where you can pay with a swipe of your credit card. But LA has launched a simple, low-tech solution to make parking better: Well-designed signage that offers no ambiguity whatsoever when it comes to where you…

This New Parking App Can Find Empty Spaces, No Sensors Required

Parking sucks, and that’s why there are plenty of apps to help your car find a vacant spot. Trouble is, those solutions tend to require expensive sensors to be installed in each and every one of those potentially open spots. A new app called PocketParker instead leverages the power of passive, portable sensors—the ones already…

Apple Patent Helps Find Your Car Even When You Can’t Get a Signal

A pair of new Apple patents explain how your phone could help you find your car in the parking lot, even if you’re struggling to get a phone signal and aren’t in range of a GPS satellite. The patents—”Automatic identification of vehicle location” and “Vehicle location in weak location signal scenarios“—describe how an iOS device…

Toxic Algae, Razor Blades, Olympics: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

Lake Erie turned an eerie shade of green due to a toxic algae bloom, steering Toledo away from the taps. Someone putting razor blades in parking meters is making New Jersey residents wary. And 10 years later, poor Athens is still paying the price for hosting the Olympics. It’s What’s Ruining Our Cities. An algae…

All Parking Signs Should Be This Easy to Read

Parking signs can be some of the most confusing things on the planet. But New York City-based designer Nikki Sylianteng is on a quest to change that, with a new style of sign which finally makes sense. Admitting that she’s “been hit with one too many parking tickets despite her best efforts,” she decided to…

Robotic Forklift Valet Doesn’t Even Need To See Inside Your Messy Car

Travellers flying out of Duesseldorf airport in Germany no longer have to worry about valets taking their cars for a joyride before they’re parked. A robot valet nicknamed Ray starts work today, and he’ll automatically deliver cars to a set of designated spots without even having to start them. Ray doesn’t even need to enter…

Justice! The Fire Hydrant That Earned NYC $33,000 a Year Is No More

Last month, we told you about one ambiguously marked fire hydrant that netted New York City $33,000 a year in parking tickets. (Yup, that’s more than minimal wage! For a fire hydrant!) Thanks to open data and sleuthing by I Quant NY’s Ben Wellington, the city has repainted the block. As Ben describes in his…

How your neighborhood was designed by racists. What it’s like to sit behind the wheel of a car for four hours every day. The evils of alternate-side parking. And the beauty of traveling by antique rail car. All this and more, in this week’s Urban Reads. The racist policies that determined the way your neighborhood…

How More Bike Parking Could Make Cities Better For Everyone

Car parking remains a major part of our economy, and it is easy to realize why its availability and low price are clung to so fiercely. Parking allows access for customers to stores, employees to work, entrepreneurs to meetings, tourists to places where they can deposit all their money, the needy to services, residents to…

Vacant Hotels and Unemployed Teens: What’s Ruining Our Cities This Week

An empty hotel that’s symbolic of Vegas’s bust. A parking app that’s about to turn San Francisco into one big $20/hour parking lot. And why it’s really, really important that you spend your formative years working at a Dairy Queen. Let’s look at What’s Ruining Our Cities. A lack of working teens is ruining the…

NYC’s Most Lucrative Fire Hydrant Earns The City $33,000 a Year

The fire hydrant. For decades, it has been feared by any New York City driver who dares to venture out without a tape measure. If your car comes within 15 feet of a hydrant, the next thing you know you may be at the tow pound, picking it up with a several hundred dollar bill.…

Google Now Can Remember Where You Parked

Google Now is getting a new superpower: it’s going to be able to remember where you parked. Using your phone’s sensors, it’ll figure out when you’ve exited a moving vehicle and remember your car’s location automatically, so you don’t even have to think twice. Of course, that means you could also get parking locations when…

Three of the World’s Prettiest Parking Garages Are In One Small City

Parking garages are ugly by their very nature: They’re metal cages that take up valuable space in our cities to house our automobiles for a few high-priced hours. But not all garages have to be ugly. In fact, three of the most beautiful are located within a few blocks of each other, in the city…