XM's new ParkingLink feature

Locating a parking spot in a big city ranks among drivers' most nagging frustrations and new services aim to direct drivers to open spots.

Taking advantage of the Web and new generation vehicle navigation systems, these offerings give drivers more information to help them find the closest - and sometimes cheapest - available spot.

ParkingSearch.com is a "virtual exchange" that lists open parking spaces within ZIP codes, said the company's founder Stephen Sinclair.

While the majority of the roughly 6,000 spaces currently listed on ParkingSearch.com are from commercial lots, there are a small number of residential spots for sale, rent or sublet. The availability may range from a six-month sublet to a space that is only available during the weekend. The number of parking spaces listed fluctuates seasonally as well as regionally, Mr. Sinclair said.

ParkingSearch.com's biggest markets are Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to Mr. Sinclair. Parking in some cities, especially Los Angeles, is so in-demand that listings are sometimes snapped up within a day of posting. "The spots come on and off so quickly that people think that in certain areas there's no parking available," Mr. Sinclair said.

In New York, an enterprising Manhattan teenager personally visited every garage in Manhattan in order to compile the locations, rate and capacity details for all 1,047 commercial garages in Manhattan, from the Financial District to Inwood, at the northern end. (That's 153,078 public parking spaces.)

Ben Sann, now a 19-year-old sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis, created an online database at Bestparking.com, (originally called NYCGarages.com .)

"People think that they are constantly being overcharged," Mr. Sann said, adding that one garage might charge as much as $60 more than its neighbor. He found that most drivers didn't verify the rates before or even after parking. "Right now, the only [other] option is to simply pull up into a garage and whatever you're going to be charged, you're going to be charged. To start comparing [rates] would be too much work."

Mr. Sann's site includes rates and locations for all public parking spots in Manhattan, Philadelphia and Boston; he expects to expand to other cities later this year. The company has partnered with Icon Parking Systems, Edison ParkFast and the soon-to-open New York Motorcycle Parking to offer parking reservations and discounted monthly rates in New York. Drivers with mobile phones and PDAs can access Bestparking.com at http://mobile.bestparking.com to get updated quotes, though Bestparking.com doesn't have information on whether spaces at a certain garage are available.

For New York, Mr. Sann recently added an application that allows garages to essentially bid for business.

"Motorists can fill out a detailed form, and specify the maximum they are willing to pay in a specified block radius around an address. Companies within that block radius will then compete for the customer's business if they can match or beat the maximum rate," Mr. Sann said.

XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. is testing a new feature to load real-time parking data into navigation systems - but it doesn't list rates.

XM's ParkingLink is designed to work alongside a vehicle's navigation system to display nearby garages; in addition to location, drivers would see how many open spaces each garage held.

"The research that we've done suggests that parking information is extremely valuable to people," said Roderick MacKenzie, vice president of XM's advanced applications and services.

XM has partnered with Standard Parking (which manages over one million parking spaces nationwide) to iron out how to harvest parking data and beam it into receivers; the companies are testing sensors on entrances and exits that count cars as they go in and out.

"We've learned a lot from doing the [real-time] traffic service and developing a weather service for navigation systems," said Mr. MacKenzie. "We've essentially taken everything we've learned there and figured out how to use that for parking information."