Teen Creates App That Could Solve The City’s Street Parking Issue

When teenager Theo Darringer’s family got a car two years ago, it quickly became his prized possession. He loved driving and the convenience that came with it. But living in Manhattan, he came to know the city’s car owners’ ever-increasing challenge of finding open street parking spots.

On average, New Yorkers waste 107 hours per year searching for parking.

Around 175,000 households in Manhattan have a car. Those who choose to park on the street are vying for one of the roughly 190,000 street parking spots in the borough, oftentimes circling the block for an extra 30 minutes to find an opening.

“New York City is a very busy city,” Darringer said. “I think the last thing people need is another four to five hours of their month wasted just for finding parking when I know that it’s a fixable issue.”

Now, Darringer, 18, is offering a solution to the problem. At the end of June, Darringer released an app, ParkSignal NYC, that detects open street parking spots.

While the app is still in its early days, Darringer envisions that ParkSignal NYC could end the era of spending hours searching for parking.

“There is always a spot where you can park at in your vicinity,” Darringer said. “The issue is just finding it.”

The issue is only on track to worsen too, as spots are further constricted by the city’s new Empire Bins, plans to turn parking lots into housing, and temporary events like Summer Streets.

Darringer said that if his app can cancel out further difficulty in finding parking, then it’s a win-win.

The app currently uses the city’s real-time traffic camera footage to detect open spots. Each camera is represented by a dot on a map of the city. If the dot is red, the parking spaces within the camera’s view are occupied. But if it’s green, a spot is open.

Darringer, who lives on the Upper East Side, has connected roughly 75 cameras throughout Manhattan to the app already. His overall goal is to progress to other boroughs — currently he has some cameras in Brooklyn and the Bronx connected to the app as well.

The app even tracks and considers the city’s street-cleaning schedule, as well as when street-cleaning is suspended for holidays.

Currently, he estimates that the app is accurate 90% of the time. App users can see the live feed for themselves to double-check for the 10% it’s not.

While he’s working to both expand locations and improve the accuracy, the approval from the city’s car owners is clear: Just a month after launching, ParkSignal NYC already has nearly 3,600 downloads.

Getting Into Gear

Darringer’s love for cars stems from his grandfather, who collected BMWs. Darringer and his father would sometimes race those BMWs on private tracks.

“I wish New Yorkers could have an easier time appreciating cars, but there are a lot of things going against driving in the city,” Darringer said.

Apart from the parking situation, there’s also the traffic, congestion pricing, and tolls to get in and out of the city. Even the coveted street parking spots have their downsides, too, as they increase the risk of your car getting dinged or dented.

Darringer said he tries to park in a spot he can see from his window, so he knows if something does happen to the car. He realized if he was going to spend that much time monitoring his family’s car, he might as well invest in a camera to do it for him.

This is where the idea for the app began.

Darringer, who is majoring in data science at Pennsylvania State University, has always been an engineer at heart, whether he’s building a go-kart or running his own investment firm.

“Once I have an exciting idea, I work on it right away,” Darringer said.

With the vision, he went to the artificial intelligence chatbot Claude to help him code and build out the app. Within days, it was approved by the Apple App Store.

At first, the app was feeding the live traffic camera feed into an AI image detection model to analyze whether there was an available spot. However, this began costing Darringer $200 to $300 a day.

Darringer wants ParkSignal NYC to be free, but at this rate, he realized he would have to implement a paywall. He decided to take a different approach and switch to a computer vision model, which he trains to recognize open spots.

The computer vision model actually ended up improving detection accuracy. Plus, it only costs him $50 a month, which he said he’s happy to cover.

Rolling It Out

The main drawback for Darringer is the amount of time required to train the system to recognize an open parking spot. Darringer has to manually annotate around 100 frames of footage per camera for the system to recognize an open spot on its own. Every time he adds a new camera to the map, it takes him around an hour.

Within the next few weeks, Darringer plans to get as many of the real-time traffic cameras connected to the app as possible, with a focus on covering areas where street parking is prevalent — as opposed to neighborhoods where driveways are more common.

Another challenge is that there aren’t that many real-time traffic cameras, so the app would only be able to detect a select number of parking spots as is.

The solution Darringer is proposing for this links back to his initial inspiration: using a network of private cameras to fill in the gaps. The sole purpose of these cameras would be to track parking, and Darringer plans to pay people to host them outside their windows.

To pay for these cameras, he wants to avoid going the route of a paywall. Instead, Darringer has been talking with venture capitalists. In return, Darringer believes the city’s parking data may be of value to certain transportation companies in a year or two.

“I can see how this might be useful to a delivery service like UPS,” Darringer said. “They have these delivery trucks, and they’re constantly getting tickets for parking for double parking illegally.”

Darringer hopes to start setting up the private network of cameras this fall. Completing this won’t be a light lift as he returns to college for his junior year this fall, and he acknowledged that he may spend his weekends going back and forth between his university and the city.

But he said the eight-hour round trip will be worth it to him.

Driving Support

On a Facebook post Darringer made to share the app, over a hundred users took to the comment section to share their support and ask for certain locations. Some even asked it to be brought to different cities.

“Impressed isn’t enough to say about your work. Wow,” one user typed.

However, Darringer said he has received one negative comment.

“I got one comment about how people are giving up their freedoms in the name of convenience,” Darringer said. “But what I would say for the city cameras is that those already exist. They’re already out there.”

The critique comes amid growing fears nationwide about being recorded in public without knowing it. However, the city’s real-time traffic cameras have been around for years, and anyone can access the footage through the Department of Transportation’s website.

Currently, the quality of the city camera feed is dismal at best — it’s good enough for parking spot detection, but would be difficult to read a plate on a car or make out a distinguishable feature on a pedestrian.

The quality of the private cameras Darringer plans to add wouldn’t be much better, either. In the view of one that he has already synced to the app, the level of detail is about the same as the city cameras.

“I guess it’s as simple as it’s a public street,” he said.

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive otherwise. Out of all of the comments he received, the most memorable to him has been the first comment from a stranger saying that ParkSignal NYC had worked.

It was the first sign that not only were people excited about the app, but it had actually worked and saved someone time.

“It really is a great feeling knowing that I’m having some sort of impact,” Darringer said.