Late 21st Century Valet Parking

Jun 22, 2009

A map showing the no-bicycle-parking-on-street zone in and around Shibuya Station - highlighting official bicycle parking lots. The map serves as a background reminder to anyone foolish enough to leave their bicycle for too long - thousands are carted off to the bicycle impound every day and it can cost ~3,000 Yen (22 Euro) + time to recover.

Parking is a atoms-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time kinda problem - how best to location shift the bicycle from [where you are now] to [where the bicycle needs to be to be sufficiently out of the way] whilst it is not needed to [where you are now] when you are ready to ride again?

When everyone carries a device to mediate their own view of the city (greater awareness of parking restrictions, alternatives), we have a greater, real-time awareness of the objects that matter to us (absolute and/or relative location positioning & vice versa the object's awareness of us, it's status), and the ability to create micro-markets on the fly (micro-payments + trust models + social networks + some degree of predictive models) we'll see new forms of 21st century valet parking where your bicycle is just where you expect it to be.