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French Use Space Tech To Find Parking Spots
itwbennett writes "Using technology developed by French space agency CNES (Centre Nationale d'Etudes Spatiales) to explore the planet Venus, drivers in the city of Toulouse are discovering something much more down-to-earth: vacant parking spots. The system is based on 3,000 sensors buried just under the pavement that detect changes in the electromagnetic environment around them and communicate the results via coaxial cable to a server, which makes the information available in real time to drivers' smartphones."
I wonder whether Toulouse has laws against using your smartphone while driving -- this could be a nice income source for the municipality as well, staking out the parking spots with hidden cameras!
We have the same thing at some commuter train parking lots in the Chicago area. Between two lots I know of, they combine for over 3,000 spots. And we didn't need freakin' NASA to create the technology
Ours are better here because they are not so outrageously French.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
So the plan is to explore Venus by burying sensors around the planet and detecting when something parks on top of them?
At least the pioneers will be able to locate a parking spot quickly!
3000 sensors deployed used to monitor 15000 parking spaces... It would be interesting to find out how such buried sensors could do that.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
You made a joke about the French being cowards and their women having too much hair! Hahahahahaha! That is both clever and original sir, i salute you! The only thing I can't understand is why you posted anonymously and denied yourself credit for such hilarity!
We have a similar system in San Francisco:
http://sfpark.org/how-it-works/
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
They have had something like this at BWI for years. Even better - you don't have to look at your phone while driving. There are red and green lights marking open spots and the number of free spaces listed at the head of each row.
Similarly, the parking structure at the Grove in LA lists the number of free spaces per floor.
Parking spots in most cities in the world are scarce because they are priced well below what they are worth. By letting demand set the price (i.e. raise it dramatically) you deal with several problems all in one fell swoop:
- parking unavailability
- people polluting the air and causing congestion endlessly circling for a cheap/free spot
- enforcement of time limits currently in place for free spots
- using space age technology to detect free spaces
The tech sounds neat but it's just over-complicating an already over-complicated situation.
... the parking lots have displays showing how many spots are still free. When you drive in and get your ticket, the number is decremented. When you drive out, putting the paid ticket back into the machine, it gets incremented. Very simple and effective. However, you need to be physically close to the parking lot to see the display. But I'm not sure if I want a bunch of folks fiddling with their smart phones, while trying to drive as well.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Step on it Pierre, no time Toulouse!
"The 3,000 sensors, buried about nine inches apart, are able to pinpoint open parking spots within 980 feet"
Something doesn't seem right about that.
DDoP (Distributed Denial of Parking) attacks -- the ultimate in dick driving!
"Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power." -- James Madison
Is there a parking problem on Venus? I would have thought that there was plenty of room, given how few cars are designed to operate in such a hostile environment.
disclaimer : I'm a municipal elected official, and we just had the local planning board (which covers two counties) for a parking study.
The trick is, you want to have open parking spaces, because open spaces mean that people can use the shops, but you don't want to make it so that people park for too long in the prime spots. So, you have to go to tiered pricing with different time limits:
Sometimes you don't need to raise prices, you just need to lower the time limit ... we've got a few shop owners who park their vehicles on main street as there's 2 hour meters with no limit on time ... but I'm guessing they'd be less likely to hog those spots if they had to go out every hour to feed the meters, even if the rates per hour were the same.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I don't buy it for a minute. If it was really about "reducing pollution" they wouldn't be going after "illegal long term parkers" because after all a car that is turned off generates no exhaust fumes. This is just another revenue ploy.
A car that blocks a parking lot for a week forces dozens of short term parkers to search another five minutes for another lot.
Fandroids hate facts.
If he wanted credit, he'd post with his username and call Americans fat and stupid. Modded +5 in no time.
As an Anonymous Coward American, I want to say that not all of us have forgotten the debt we owe to Lafayette.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,723162,00.html
Much better article. The sensors detect a vehicle parked immediately above it, not 900ft away.
..are now "space technology"?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If he wanted credit, he'd post with his username and call Americans fat and stupid. Modded +5 in no time.
I may be fat and stupid, but you
Wow, you mean they rebuilt the infamous "White Elephant" Bullring carpark on the other side of town, after knocking it down 10 years ago after it was derilict for 30 years?
If he wanted credit, he'd post with his username and call Americans fat and stupid. Modded +5 in no time.
Yes, but as an american he's too fat and stupid to realize that.
> not all of us have forgotten the debt we owe to Lafayette.
Sure ! Without him you would probably all still speak english.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
i need a parking SPOT, not the parking LOT - WTF 980 feet... sensors 9 inches apart.. that many sensors and you cant come closer than a quarter mile?
"The 3,000 sensors, buried about nine inches apart, are able to pinpoint open parking spots within 980 feet and send an alert to a server, which makes the information available in real time to drivers using a special app on their smart phones."
http://xkcd.com/562/
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
I park at the far end and walk a bit further. I don't waste time chasing spaces, and I get a little exercise. I don't pay for a gym membership either.
If you want to employ multibillion dollar tech to solve this "huge problem", be my guest. Sheesh!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Micro changes in air density, my ass!
In theory, a business would contract a towing company to promptly evacuate and impound any bad parkers. This would give the business a no nonsense reputation that would earn respect.
In practice, tolerating temporary bad parking may be a necessary evil on account of how much leverage a disgruntled driver can hold sway over the bottom line, so being a paying customer may well be grounds enough to demand the perk of being allowed to park screwy.
I don't see what's so great about this. They have to bury a huge number of sensors in pavement, and they're wired devices; they are all on a coax cable. Buried cables in pavement are a huge maintenance headache. Freeze/thaw cycles and traffic pressure damage the cables over time.
UC Berkeley has developed a wireless sensor for such applications. It's an extremely low power device powered by the compression of the pavement as cars go by.
But the real competition is cameras. In the last ten years, the trend in California has been to replace traffic sensing loops with cameras and video processing. One camera can replace the loops for all lanes on an intersection face. Electronics is cheaper than all the pavement-cutting and wiring needed to get the traffic loops wired back to the controller. Finding open spaces in big outdoor parking lots can be done with a small number of cameras.
Still does make sense. If the car moves, then the spot is taken for a time, then another would take it, and so on. Sounds like they just need some parking meters and meter maids.
Seriously, this would be such an incredibly simple, cheap and useful solution: For every large open parking lot, put a webcam on a roof or nearby antenna. When you arrive at the parking lot, a quick look on your smartphone will immediately show you where the open spots are. No need for sensors (which are expensive, will fail regularly, and may not detect small and/or incorrectly parked vehicles, motorcycles,...), no complicated connections with underground coax cables, no expensive maintenance. Just one webcam, connected to some small server which is connected to the internet.
Of course indoor parking lots would be more difficult, sensors are probably a better bet there. But then you can use much simpler detectors, for example optical ones mounted on the roof.
If I understand the technology employed here, it is the same tech my corner stop light uses to detect cars waiting for the light to change, only instead of using the data on car presence to influence a stop light, they are using coaxial cable to send the info to a server which makes it available to a web server... All of this is fairly common technology - you can literally find most if not all of it on any major intersection in America.
Oh but wait, your smartphone is using it's GPS to determine where your car is, and while I guess that is 'technically' space technology (it involves geosynchronous satellites to determine position of the device), it isn't really so fantastical, people have been using the same technology to 'geotag' family snapshots for years on their iPhones...
Ken
3,000 French sensors can't be wrong!
Unless this is a serious improvement over the sensors used in US roadways its going to have a problem detecting motorcycles. Most have too little metal to set off the sensors, which is why you sometimes see bikers parking their bikes, and running over to hit the walk button.
Yeah, this is just an excuse for the government to have another electronic “eye” watching you all the frigging time.
The goal isn’t to eliminate wrongdoers, the goal is to monetize them more efficiently. If wrongdoers were eliminated, they wouldn’t make any money off parking tickets. It’s just the same argument as the red-light cameras, which my city has had for a while and is currently considering moving them to new intersections because hardly anyone runs the cameras any more. Mission accomplished – wait, these aren’t making any more money... problem? Only if your goal was to make money.
Of course if they move them, I’m sure the previously-monitored intersections will pretty quickly return to exactly as they were before the cameras were installed. If the goal is to cut down on T-bone accidents caused by red-light runners at intersections that are identified as particularly bad for this sort of thing, the cameras need to stay at those intersections, yeah? Moving the cameras to less-bad intersections simply to generate more revenue could actually result in people getting killed. Priorities? You bet.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
LOL, that does remind me though of when I visited a European country and the guy we were staying with was parking. Some guy in an orange reflective vest (I didn’t see any other official sort of mark on him) was walking up and down the rows of cars collecting money and slipping papers under the wipers of cars that had been paid for. I wondered (though I didn’t ask) how anybody knew whether the guy was legit or not.
Granted, I’ve heard stories about stuff like that (e.g. the guy who collected a few million from somewhere like the London Zoo parking lot or something like that and nobody noticed he wasn’t supposed to be there until he just didn’t show up one day), but living in the United States it’s pretty hard to imagine how that could possibly happen until you’ve been to a country like that and seen how things work. Here, I doubt the guy would last a week unless maybe the city government just didn’t care enough to investigate.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Interesting, but it doesn't sound particularly unique. I know of several companies which feature very similar technology. Actually, this one company in particular pairs it up to parking meters that allow the city to track if parked cars have paid for the spot or if they're in violation. That's not something your average person looks forward to, but they do also allow for the opportunity to inform drivers of open spots, as well as letting you know that your meter is about to expire.
I'm also not sure why this system's sensors need to be buried so closely together (9" apart) and apparently aren't connected to individual parking spaces. So presumably there's some level of extra complexity here in order for this to work. The ones I've seen feature a small unit under each parking spot. Each sensor corresponds to a specific spot which seems more logical to me. But for all I know the technology is a lot more similar than the article would indicate.
They have guns too, only dropped twice, never fired. Being descended from the French, I feel quite alright making jokes, laughing is the best medicine after all.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Yup. And they held on to Vietnam (French Indochina) for much longer than the US did.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Call me when your argument has anything to do with the point the AC was making.
Fandroids hate facts.
We're not fat. We're an advanced evolution of the existing physical form with no need for the ancient muscles used only for hunting and agriculture. We will soon give up our cow-like bodies to dwell in Facebook-space and then we'll see who's laughing.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
if all parking spots were allocated by a computer system. We can remove all the parking meters also.
Nav system can find you a parking spot from the system.
What is required is all spots managed by the system require the allocation from the system before use.
There can be police to maintain the rule, or remote control blocker to enforce the rule.
Parking meters can be remove too, the system can also accept payments while allocating the parking spot.
contact kentsin@yahoo.com if want more
Instead of sending the info to people's smartphones, the city should use it to adjust the rates for parking meters to reflect real-time demand. When the parking spot vacancy rate falls below 15%, increase the meter rates, and if the vacancy rate rises above 15%, decrease the meter rates. You'll never have to worry about finding a parking spot again, and you'll always be able to park close enough to right outside your destination. Parking spots are a scarce resource, and we usually ration scarce resources via price, not queuing. Strangely it's only with roads we tolerate queuing instead of price, both for driving (waiting in traffic jams) and parking (circling the block).