What Will Parking Be Like in 100 Years?

A hundred years ago parking was not an issue. The auto-mobile was still in its infancy and there were few of them. Today, cities and roads teem with auto-mobiles. Parking outside your apartment home itself is problematic. Travel to any part of the city or to another city and the problem magnifies. You could spend precious minutes simply finding a parking lot and when you do find one, it may not have vacant slots. The situation could become nightmarish in a couple of years. Fortunately cities across the world, especially in developed countries, are implementing ITS-intelligent traffic systems of which parking is one part that could ease the woes of drivers looking for a suitable vacant slot in a nearby lot.

Currently available parking systems are sophisticated enough to help motorists avoid unnecessary hardship in finding a parking lot. A typical scenario is that of a motorist approaching a city or that of a motorist in one part of a city, both looking for a parking lot in the vicinity. Modern parking control management solutions help them. At the heart of the system lies a central controlling computer that takes inputs from parking lots in the area to which it is tied. The parking lots feed live information about vacant slots available. The computer then feeds this information to suitably located parking guidance signs located alongside the roads. The sign is usually made of high bright LED display and it can show the turn off point and the name of the nearest parking lot as well as vacant slots. A parking lot operator can also put up the parking lot guidance system outside to indicate availability of slots with the use of these signs and direct motorists to the appropriate space inside with smart parking sensor platform. Right at the entrance to the parking area the parking lot layout display gives motorists an idea of how to navigate. With a suitable parking guidance management system and a parking payment machine, a parking lot operator can issue tickets automatically and track transactions.

Parking Guidance Display

Where will it go from here? What will it be like in 100 years? It is difficult to envisage given the rate of advancement of technologies. A motorist could well enter a destination in the car navigation system and it will automatically drive by itself. At the time of setting the destination, the system could easily find out nearest parking lots and vacancies in those lots. The system could automatically book a slot and, on arrival, the car would drive itself into the slot after leaving the driver at the entrance. Payment would be deducted automatically.

The current scenario is one in which a motorists arrives at a parking lot only to find it full. More such cars create traffic jams. For those already parked, retrieving vehicles is a challenge just as it is for those who have been allotted a slot. Payment is a problem. It takes time, much fuel is wasted unnecessarily and tempers are frayed. None of these will happen in the future as parking becomes automated.