Google Maps and Apple Maps are making parking harder than it has to be

Navigation apps all have a blind spot when it comes to parking. New research shows that they could make finding a spot so much easier and less stressful, shaving precious minutes off travel time.

[Photos: Jean-Philippe Delberghe/Unsplash; Apple Maps]

It’s a familiar frustration for car owners: Before heading to a meeting downtown, you open a navigation app to ensure you’ll get there on time. Driving takes about as long as predicted, but you hadn’t planned for the hassle of parking. The closest lot turns out to be full, as are two others nearby. Anxiety rising, you finally find a spot further away and race several blocks to your appointment. When you arrive, you’re embarrassingly late.

Popular navigation apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps have given little guidance about parking, leaving users to fend for themselves as they decide where to hunt for a spot and how much time to budget for the search.

New research from MIT suggests that these services could take some of the guesswork out of parking by giving better advice. Doing so wouldn’t just lower stress levels; it could also help travelers waste fewer minutes cruising for a spot, thickening traffic and spewing pollution as they circle.

The new paper, entitled “Probability-Aware Parking Selection,” is written by Cathy Wu, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, along with Cameron Hickert, Sirui Li, and Zhengbing He. Wu says that she grew curious about navigation apps’ handling of parking when she noticed that they predict time spent walking to and from transit stops but not to and from parking spaces.

“What my colleagues and I have been calling ‘time to arrive’ is a metric that is not uniformly presented across modes,” Wu says. If drivers had more useful information, she and her coauthors wondered, could they make better travel decisions?

The answer they reached was a resounding “yes.” Accessing data from the city of Seattle about occupancy of paid parking lots, Wu and her colleagues constructed a model to guide hypothetical drivers toward the lot that best balances proximity to a chosen destination and the likelihood of finding a spot available. (Due to data limitations, their model assumes all parking costs the same.)

The researchers concluded that the potential time savings are substantial: as much as 35 minutes per trip when compared with driving toward the closest lot and waiting for a spot to become free. In the most congested environments, travelers’ total time to arrive drops by as much as two-thirds.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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