This is such a simple idea; it’s simply a way to show if a given parking space in a parking garage is occupied or not, from a good distance away. It’s just using overhead lights – green if the spot is open, red if occupied – but the difference it makes for the act of driving around a parking garage looking for a spot is – and I know this sounds kind of hyperbolic because I’m just talking about a parking garage – dramatic. I’ve discussed this with a few people, and found that while these seem to exist fairly commonly in parking garages in Europe, China, Australia and other places around the world, they’re relatively rare here in America, and I think that should change.
It’s such an obvious solution! And a good one! No more would you be fooled by a tiny Miata nestled between a pair of elephantine SUVs, because the light above the spot would see all you can’t! You could just scan down the aisles overhead, looking for that emerald glow that means there’s safe harbor for your car, covering far more area far more quickly than driving by the rows of cars, desperately scanning.
I actually had never encountered such a thing until I saw this tweet:
Absolute freaking genius. Red/green lights automatically come on for taken/free parking spaces. Never seen this before and makes finding a space so much easier, especially when it’s full of giant SUVs.
???? pic.twitter.com/gaVf7UCR9C
— Tim Oldland (@Tim_Oldland) July 29, 2024
As I talked to people, I found that this actually exists for bathrooms, too:
They use the same system at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport above toilets. pic.twitter.com/K5JiB7cHox
— Peter R. (@PRydlakowski) July 29, 2024
…which is also fantastic, saving people from the bowel-chilling horror of hearing that stall door rattle and clank as you’re crafting your deposit, praying for solitude. 
But! We’re still a car blog, not a bathroom blog (yet), and so let’s stay on these parking spot light things. They seem to be made by a number of companies, with a few different designs. There’s UFO-looking ones that communicate wirelessly to ground sensors, and there’s also systems where the lights are mounted on a common rail, using ultrasonic transducers to determine if the spot is empty or occupied.
Some of these give a strange Christmas-y look to parking garages, with all those red-and-green lights, and that also brings up an interesting flaw with these systems that likely should have been considered, but can also be easily solved.
In reading some other online forums where people like me, formerly ignorant of such systems and now dazzled by them, I found that there was a group of people who could not get the benefit from these setups: color blind people.
Specifically red/green colorblindness, which is the most common kind, affecting 8% of men globally and 0.5% of women. To them, these rows of lights are the same color, and communicate pretty much no useful information beyond the fact that there is electricity in the garage. [Ed Note: These are quite common in Germany, and they use sensors to know when a car is parked. The sensors also tell you how many spots are left on each floor, with the readout on a display — this would still be useful even to colorblind folks. -DT].
But it would be so easy to fix! If the system was changed to leave the lights off if a car is present and only illuminate if the spot is free, then color blind people and everyone else could easily see what spots were open, just by looking for the lights. It would likely save electricity, too, since an occupied spot would have its light off, taking no power (well, assuming it’s a commonly-full lot).
The one thing that may require color is that handicapped spots in many of these systems show up as blue, which is a useful addition. Hopefully, blue should be distinguishable from other light even for people with red/green color blindness.
The main point is that some system like this could make the parking garage spot-finding experience so much better. This feels even more useful than those numeric signs that tell you how many spots are free, because they add the element of location to the system, which is, of course, useful as hell. I mean, you can’t not park in a location, right? It’s a big factor.
I get that there is some initial costs to adding systems like this, and those of you reading this who own parking garages may be reluctant to invest in new equipment, but I think the quality of experience you’ll be giving to your parking customers will be worth it. Look, maybe you eat dogfood for a couple of weeks – I’m okay with that! Especially if that dogfood is Ol’ Roy, which has a Country Stew complete with corn, peas and carrots! Why, with dogfood like this, I bet every parking garage owner will happily upgrade their systems to include visual free parking spot indicators!
Anyway, the parking garage world, especially here in America, has plenty of room for improvement. Simple solutions like this I think would go a long way.
I know you’re fascinated by Ol’ Roy and probably have a macro to insert the description and link automatically every time the term “dog food” appears in your text, but I hope that’s not what you feed your actual dog.
I’ve seen these in at least a dozen parking garages in the DC/NoVA metro area. They seem to be catching on quickly. The garage floors even have digital signage showing how many spaces are still available on each level. Neat stuff!
As expected, there always seem to be a few false positives that are showing an available parking space despite being occupied.
They’re pretty much in every new parking garage in our area.
Oh look – Someone made it to the Westfield Century City Mall this week!
They’ve been there since at least 2013.
Why aren’t these in more garages?
Money.
I’ve encountered them in a few airport garages. Like the idea, but they were wrong/didn’t work/signs incorrect. I ignore them now.
I first saw these lights in a parkade in France and thought they were brilliant! I’ve seen a few parkades in Canada that do something similar — at Pacific Centre in Vancouver they have a light on if the space is free and no light if it is occupied.
That is brilliant- they need to put this in the Detroit short-term airport parking where there are always giant GMC Yukons blocking the view.
I recall about 40 years ago going into a bank where there was a snake queue and 10 tellers or so (yes, I’m old!). There was a light that that the teller would turn on so the next in line knew which teller was open. I was in a Marshalls recently that had the same thing.
I’m guessing that whoever owns a parking lot without this simple (and not innovative) convenience feature doesn’t give a shit about who parks there. I mean, someone has to pay for this feature. If publicly owned, taxes. If privately owned, say a shopping mall, increase the rents. A paid-parking lot? Higher parking fee.
Is anyone refusing to park at places that don’t have these? Well, not yet, I don’t think. Would need some grass-roots action or actual boycotts for such a first-world problem. Or, city ordinances.
Should use white instead of green.
CVG parking garage has these. great idea.
The colorblind accessible way to implement this (which I’ve seen at least once, but don’t remember where) is the occupied lights are red Xs and the open lights are green Os. Doesn’t have to be X O of course, any shape+color indicator will suffice.
I first saw this at an airport over 10 years ago, and since then have seen it at two malls, and a couple other airports. I seriously don’t understand how they didn’t become ubiquitous by now.
We have them at Mall of America in MN, as well as counters of how many open spots are available on each level of the ramps for the mall. It’s freaking awesome.
I was looking at tes photos while reading, and thinking that I didn’t see any difference between the colors. Then I read : “I found that there was a group of people who could not get the benefit from these setups: color blind people.” and then “If the system was changed to leave the lights off if a car is present and only illuminate if the spot is free”. If only more people in charge of system design were more aware of color-blindness, my life would be more easy…
Seatac Airport parking garage has them.
Can’t use “off = occupied” because if the light fails, it will appear the same as “occupied”. Instead, consider the genius of traffic lights (since a refresher is apparently needed) where red/green colorblindness isn’t an issue: they use position as well as color to differentiate between visual indicators. Shape of the light might also work in conjunction with color.
That said, location probably matters far more to parking garage competitiveness than ‘ease of finding an open spot’ which removes nearly all of the financial incentive to install these.
Could make the green light a little brighter.
I thought of using multiple lights instead of shape or color, but it has the same failure mode issues. Maybe brightness could work/be more reliable depending on how it’s achieved?
Clear for “this spot is clear” might be more on point?
I mean, if the issue is a light failure, well, that defaults to the same situation as having no status lights anywhere. So, 90% of the time, better than default. Yes, someone will have to be employed to replace bulbs.
Sometimes I guess we just take things for granted. In Sweden basically every parking garage in the entire country have had these lights for at least 10-15 years. Have not even considered that there are still places where this is not a standard solution.
Yep; San Francisco International Airport long-term parking garage was built with these. And, yes, they are awesome and, yes, they are only about 85% accurate. Quite a few false positives but still super helpful.
Discussion of color blindness gives me the opportunity to share one of my favorite annoying client stories: The insisted that we remove all colors from a training manual we had developed because they were absolutely convinced that people who suffered from color blindness literally could not see color. They thought any text in a color would just appear as a blank space. I have no idea how they thought people functioned in the world and weren’t frequently running into or run over by brightly colored objects they couldn’t see.
“Yeah, he heard the rumble of the school bus approaching and even made eye contact with the driver, but I guess he couldn’t make out the giant yellow structure around the driver. What a tragic way to go.”
First time I saw this was in Canada, and it’s a great idea. I’ve also seen parking garages that tell you the count of open spaces, but don’t have individual indicator lights. Makes me wonder if the count is real or not.
And I guess Torch has never been to Vegas? They have them in the parking garages of the newer hotels.
Casinos in Vegas are the only places where I have been to that have these.
I have been to Vegas many times, but I have never been in a Vegas parking garage.
It’s probably some cars-in, cars-out counter. Back in college I entered a deck with an open spot sign confidently declaring “2” but there were none to be seen. I can’t remember if there were handicap spots or if they were occupied.
When can we expect a rollout of The Toiletopian, with Torch waxing lyrical about flushing mechanisms?
Back on topic my city has put up electronic signs downtown that show number of available spaces in the garage and parking lots so you know where to start looking.
We already have The Morning Dump.
Saw these at a mall in metro Milwaukee a couple years ago, and it really did make the parking process easier.
Anybody who has parked at a major DC-area airport daily lot or at Northern Virginia’s busiest mall (Tysons Corner Center) in the last few years knows these things well. In theory, they are a beautiful thing. In my experience, they are maybe 85-92 percent accurate. That may sound ok, but ask anyone trying to park at DCA during the holidays, extrapolate that rate over thousands of spaces, and the frustration level will make you madder than hell. See, these sensors feed the data displays both at the garage entrance and at every floor of the garage. Also, it feeds websites with live parking availability data. If a garage is 97-98 percent full, you may pull the trigger to enter (because you have kids in car seats and finding an Uber with car seats is hell) and try to pull into the nearest green lighted space. Then you find out all the green ones are just malfunctioning sensors. You will then curse the manufacturer for a good 10 minutes straight all the while hunting manually and wondering what you will do because there is no realistic nearby off-premises parking and it’s too late to take your car back and grab an Uber with two car seats.
I have been on parking garage floors where 20+ spaces have been shown available and every single green light is a malfunction. Reliability is the most important part of these systems and until they can get to 99+ percent accuracy 99+ percent of the time, just give me a guesstimate on the sign outside and I’ll manually hunt like I always do as soon as I see a car in a green lighted space. (And it seems to be a car in a green lighted space far more often than an unoccupied space with a red light.)
They have these at DCA? I have seen the billboards that tell how many spaces are open on each floor but I have never seen the overhead lights. I was just there a couple of weeks ago, maybe I missed them somehow.
We have a few garages with them around me. The first one I saw was at a hospital parking garage. They are fantastic but people still seem to not understand what they are because they are rare.
We have these in some parking garages in Denver. Specifically one for the cultural center garage which is partially city owned and abuts the Denver Art Museum and the Denver Public Library. It’s really useful because these garages have huge numbers of spaces (I’d guess 500+) and you can glance across levels to see if there are any “green” spaces over there before traversing the sea of parking.
Cherry Creek mall also has these
Brilliant, but most US places will be too cheap to add these. Can’t be cutting into those profit margins.
That was my first thought. They aren’t common here because (a) they cost money (b) they require power (c) they need maintenance and (d) the garage owner doesn’t want to hear a Karen complaining when they aren’t accurate.
They have these in the PDX airport and they are definitely a beautiful thing. So much better than endlessly circling.
Every time I pulled into a spot at PDX, I tried to watch the light to see at what point it changes color, but I could never see it. Always wanted to park in there in a convertible with the top down so I could watch it change.
Reminds me of the mysteries of the refrigerator light when I was a child.
I came here to say the same thing about PDX. The parking situation there has always been a bit funky, especially during the construction the last several years, but those lights made a HUGE difference.
Came here to mention PDX as well!
Big fan of the counters with remaining spots by floor and row. It completely changed the feel of using the short term lot.
Only thing better than that about PDX is the free motorcycle parking.
“These are quite common in Germany, and they use sensors to know when a car is parked. The sensors also tell you how many spots are left on each floor, with the readout on a display…”
The biggest peeve about the readout on a display outside is lot of arseholes toeing their vehicles over the boundary lines, rendering the available spot too narrow to park, even with Peel P50 car.
The parking space had been narrow for many years, and the vehicles had gotten wider and wider over the years due to the safety equipment. This led to many idiots with SUVs and fancy cars parking however they want and don’t give a fuck about others.
The situation is so bad in Germany, but the politicians and anal retentive people from Ordnungsamt (code enforcement agency) aren’t doing anything about this.
Mmm, interesting. Same system in Spain, but since we are poor we cannot afford big SUVs or fancy cars, so… problem solved!