Automatically detect car parking restrictions and set a timer on your phone to let you know when you need to move your car—never get a parking ticket again because you forgot that street sweeping happens on the first crescent moon after the equinox!

Background:

A car owner may sometimes be ticketed for parking in a location that was valid, but became invalid due to a highly specific restriction (e.g. “street sweeping every 2nd Tuesday, 8–9 AM”).

These “rare” restrictions can be hard to remember or notice.

Proposal:

Thanks to modern omnipresent surveillance infrastructure, a person’s cell phone can now be almost certain where that person has parked their car.

Additionally, a phone can determine any parking restrictions on a street (either by checking the city’s web site, or by visually examining some recent street-level photographs).

Once the phone has both 1) car location and 2) parking restrictions, it can automatically set a timer (Figure 1) to let you know when you need to move your car!

Fig. 1: The phone knows the parking restrictions for a street (left) and where you parked your car (middle), so it can set an alert (right) so you don’t get a parking ticket.

Conclusion:

This seems like it could actually work. People might complain and/or file lawsuits if the system was ever wrong, though: is that why this hasn’t already ben implemented?

PROS: Might prevent you from getting a parking ticket!

CONS: Would reduce city revenue. This could cause the city to seek unorthodox forms of income, like imposing an income tax on cats or something.

Originally published 2024-07-15.