EasyPark Halves Time Spent Searching for Parking with New Predictive Parking Technology

With the average motorist wasting over 2,500 hours of their life searching for a space in busy city streets, parking is a huge challenge for people and cities. Studies show that 30% of traffic in congested cities is caused by people searching for parking, and that this could contribute to as much as 50 million tons of pollution across Europe.

But there is hope for desperate drivers, thanks to a team of technologists at Europe’s largest parking app, EasyPark, who have invested 10 years of R&D and over €10M to develop the first truly predictive parking technology. Find & Pay, uses big data, predictive analytics and machine learning to reduce the time it takes to find parking in congested cities by up to 50 per cent, reducing stress for motorists and the congestion and emissions associated with city parking today.

Unlike expensive and inaccurate sensor-based technologies, Find & Pay combines huge volumes of transaction data with crowd-sourced location information from users and IoT devices to create an accurate parking probability map of every city block for any given hour of the day. Using this information, Find & Pay gives users a route to their destination that passes along streets with the highest probability of parking availability – constantly balancing time in-car against walking distance to destination to find the optimal route. Find & Pay provides turn-by-turn navigation along the route, also noting available off-street parking along the route, and lets users remotely manage and pay for the parking space when they arrive, creating a simple, seamless experience.

Johan Birgersson, CEO of EasyPark Group, comments: “Our technology team have worked tirelessly for over a decade to solve one of the toughest unanswered challenges in car travel – how to quickly find suitable parking in our increasingly congested cities. Today’s navigation options take you to your destination, but fall flat when you need to find somewhere to park.

“It’s a very frustrating experience when you get where you need to go, but simply can’t park your car – Find & Pay solves this significant challenge for motorists. We’re hugely excited to start bringing the technology to market and to see the profound impact it will have on driver frustration and the challenges of congestion and pollution in cities. This technology has the potential to reduce emissions in cities by hundreds of thousands of tonnes.”

Find & Pay is currently undergoing large-scale beta testing, using over 500 testers across 31 cities to test, validate and increase predictive accuracy. The system’s self-learning algorithms will continue to improve over time, through continued testing and via continuous user feedback when it is rolled out to the public at large. Find & Pay will launch in Stockholm in September followed by rollout across over 30 major European cities during the fall. London and New York will follow in 2018 and beyond.

Unlike navigation and transportation in general, the parking industry has experienced relatively few major technology breakthroughs. With the EU industry turning over €26 billion per annum (according to the European Parking Association), and employing 569,000 people, the sector holds significant opportunity for technology-led innovation and disruption.

Birgersson concludes, “We are solving the top two needs expressed by motorists in independent surveys: rapidly finding a place to park close to their end destination; and remotely managing and paying for their parking, all in one simple mobile user experience. But this is just the first step; our technologists will continue to innovate alongside the automotive industry, integrating seamless parking experiences with in-car interfaces, alongside the EasyPark app.”

To see Find & Pay in action, click here.

About EasyPark Group 

Since 2001, our award-winning smart services have been helping drivers to find and pay for parking in 500 cities in 10 countries. But what we do doesn’t stop there. On a larger scale, our technology helps businesses, operators and cities with parking administration, planning and management. What we actually do is make urban life easier – one parking spot at a time. www.easyparkgroup.com.