Crowdsource parking

Crowdsourced parking is the phenomena where a community contributes information to the public about parking availability. This parallels the efforts of crowd-sourced navigation, where drivers contributed traffic reports (actively, or passively- like Waze has done for real time, crowdsourced traffic and navigation), and presented the entire picture of the traffic patterns.
In crowdsourced parking, drivers who are leaving their spaces, notify drivers who are looking for spaces, as to where and when they are vacating their spot. This notification process typically goes through an intermediary software which then makes the new spot available for a circling driver.
Early attempts at crowdsourced parking have been stymied as they required the departing driver (the parker) to proactively declare that they were leaving their spot. In order to motivate drivers to declare their intentions to leave, startups attempted to create a grey-economy for selling those vacating spots to the next driver. (Monkey Parking. Parkmodo and Sweetch). Those services created financial incentives for drivers to announce they were leaving their parking spot, but caught the ire of drivers, politicians and the media.
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More recently, technology companies are working to use the mobile phones' sensors to identify parking vacancies. Using a combination of mobile phone sensors, companies have been able to source the parking events without the driver needing to do any action. This was researched by ParkSense
and has been commercialized by Anagog () and ParkTag ) amongst others.
Crowdsourced parking is still in its infancy, needing massive distribution to gather worthwhile data for parking.

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