Yet another attempt to make parking in the city easier

The BMW i3 is unveiled as it wins the Green Car of the Year Award at the 2014 Los Angeles Auto Show on November 20, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. David McNew/ Getty Images

By Megan Turchi @meganturchi

June 5, 2015

2 minutes to read

Driving in Boston can be difficult enough without the added stress of attempting to find parking in a sea of “resident only’’ and “no parking’’ street signs.

BMW this week unveiled a potential solution, though it’s still a long way off from the streets of the Hub. The new project is called Dynamic Parking Prediction and its goal is to help find street parking, particularly in cities.

BMW has partnered with INRIX, a group that aggregates real-time traffic information, to do the project, which was displayed at the connected car show, TU-Automotive Detroit.

The prototype was embedded in a BMW i3, but the German carmaker hasn’t made clear its timeline for releasing the system to consumers. Fortune said this new service will first be available in Amsterdam, Cologne and Copenhagan in Europe, San Francisco and Seattle in the United States, and Vancouver in Canada. It will then continue expanding to 23 cities by the end of the year.

INRIX announced that the parking feature will answer three different questions:

– Where can I park?

– How much will parking cost?

– Is there a garage or lot nearby?

“As we continue to connect cars to smarter cities, INRIX On-Street Parking fills a critical gap that addresses the growing challenge of traffic and parking in our cities worldwide,’’ Bryan Mistele, President and CEO of INRIX said in a statement.

Diagram about how the technology will work.

The driver interface will look similar to a Google Maps traffic map, with lines of green, yellow and red showing drivers where there’s open street parking.

As The Verge points out, this is not the first company to help you find parking, but it might be the most advanced, giving drivers information and data from individual cars, even when the parking spots are not wired with sensors.

In Boston, initiatives like ParkBoston have tried to make parking more digital, using an app to pay the meter and ParkWise hopes to help Bostonians get a sense for an area that might have some free spots.

INRIX reported that up to 30 percentage of traffic congestion in cities is due to people looking for parking spots.