Crowdsourced parking lets you 'sell a spot for credits'

If you've ever driven around a city desperately in search of a parking spot, here's what you needed. A new system aims to allow drivers to buy and sell information about free spots.

The software, called TruCentive, is effectively a market for parking spaces, or what project leader Baik Hoh of Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California, calls parking availability data. Other programs, like PrimoSpot and Google's Open Spot (which was shuttered in June), have relied on good Samaritans to broadcast their parking activity with no incentive. By contrast, TruCentive rewards users with system credits that can later be used to buy information on parking spots in turn.

Hoh points out that the human element of existing crowdsourced parking systems mean they suffer from low user participation - which in turn lowers the quality of their data on which parking spots are open at any given time.

To motivate users to participate, Hoh and colleagues graded the value of parking data according to demand, so information about a spot in downtown New York City during rush hour earns a higher reward than information from the suburbs on a Sunday afternoon, say.

Users also get a bonus if their parking information allows someone else in the system to park successfully. This bonus can be controlled by the service provider, encouraging more users to try to resell their parking space by raising the amount, for instance.

In the paper, presented at the Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference in Anchorage, Alaska, this week, the researchers held up Facebook credits as an example of the kind of token that could be used. These are online credits which can be bought with real money, then used to pay for services on Facebook.