The Informed Railroad Traveler (smartphone application) real-time street parking availability estimation.

Final reportPDFTech Reporthttp://www.nurailcenter.org/research/final_reports/UIC/NURail2012-UIC-R03-Combined.pdfNURail2012-UIC-R03-AGrant Number: DTRT12-G-UTC18 (Grant 1)AlgorithmsGlobal Positioning SystemMobile applicationsParkingReal time informationSmartphonesUnited StatesNational University Rail Center (NURail)Wolfson, OuriXu, BoStenneth, LeonYu, Philip S.Yang, JieNelson, Peter C.University of Illinois at Chicago. Dept. of Computer ScienceNational University Rail Center (NURail)University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dept. of Civil and Environmental EngineeringArgonne National Laboratory. Transportation Research and Analysis Computing CenterUniversity Transportation Centers Program (U.S.)US Transportation CollectionReal-time parking availability information is important in urban areas, and if available could reduce congestion, pollution, and gas consumption. This project presents a software solution called PhonePark for detecting the availability of on-street parking spaces. The solution does not rely on any dedicated infrastructure or external sensors, and therefore is much more economical than existing solutions. For any driver carrying a mobile device with global positioning system (GPS) and/or accelerometer, PhonePark can automatically determine when and where she parked her car. The proposed technology does not rely only on GPS/accelerometer for parking activity detection, instead Bluetooth enabled mobile devices can also be utilized. Parking activities can also be detected by taking advantage of pay-by-phone parking. Further contributions include an algorithm to compute the historical parking availability profile for an arbitrary street block and algorithms to estimate the parking availability in real-time for a given street block. The algorithms are evaluated using real-time and real world street parking data