Google Can Now Predict Parking Difficulty

Earlier in February, "Google quietly launched a new parking feature for Google Maps on Android across 25 major US cities," according to Yitaek Hwang. "If you are in these metro areas, you will now see a red parking sign that indicates limited parking availability to help you plan your trip."

Hwang describes the machine learning process that Google used to determine parking difficulty before offering two lessons gleaned from Google's new parking predictor:

First, not all smart city applications require sensors. Sometimes the data is already available, and we don’t have to resort to adding new sensors to gather that information.

Second, even though neural networks are popular and accurate, sometimes simpler algorithms can fit the need just as well.