New Study Shows How Much Time and Money We Waste on Parking

Those autonomous parking garages can’t come soon enough.

byEric Brandt|
New Study Shows How Much Time and Money We Waste on Parking
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Traffic data aggregator INRIX released a study on Wednesday showing that we spend billions searching for parking spots and paying for more time than we need. It turns out the amount we overpay at meters and garages often turns out to cost more than a parking ticket would.

INRIX took an enormous sample size when gathering this data from North America and Europe. From their report: “In the first ever study to estimate the economic impact of parking pain, INRIX leveraged the INRIX Parking database of more than 35 million spaces in 8,700 cities across 100 countries and combined this with a large-scale study of 17,986 drivers’ parking behavior and experiences across 30 cities in the U.S., U.K., and Germany.”

In the US alone, motorists are wasting 17 hours and a shocking cost of $72.7 billion per year on parking. It’s no surprise that the US city that suffers the most is New York City where motorists spend 107 hours per year looking for a spot. Overpaying for parking we don’t need in the US costs us $20.4 billion per year. Compare that to how much Americans pay annually for parking fines which is $2.6 billion, about 12 percent of what we overpay to park legally. Next time you’re at the meter, think twice about putting in that last quarter.

The good news is that solutions are in the works. Bosch is working on technology that crowdsources available parking space data to make finding a spot faster and easier. There’s a luxury condo in Philadelphia that uses robots to park your car so you waste no time at all looking for a parking space.

You can download the infographic from INRIX here for the US data which reveals more info about their study in greater detail.

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