How did we ever live without GPS?
Before satellite navigation became common in cars and smartphones, drivers were forced to fumble with paper maps. Or leaf through printed-out directions from the Internet. Or stop and ask for directions. Every option was miserable compared with GPS.
Yet for all the progress in navigation, parking is still stuck in the bad old days.
Drivers headed to an unfamiliar neighborhood still must look for a parking lot ahead of time or run the risk of circling their destination in search of an affordable and available spot. It's a frustrating waste of time and fuel.
That's why it's such good news that parking is drawing a new level of attention from in-car navigation specialists such as Inrix, of Kirkland, Wash., which already taps into smartphone data to beam down cloud-based traffic updates to millions of cars.