It’s a quiet Sunday-after-boxing-day and I’m wondering if I should go to the shops.
I was somewhat surprised to see that none of the large shopping centres in Hampshire give any indication of whether their car parks are full. I was more surprised to find that the Hampshire traffic information website ROMANSE gives live data on the car park status. As in, the exact number of spaces that are available updated every minute, and a couple of estimates on the number of spaces coming available soon. I actually only found it by searching for webcams of the area to try and look at the traffic on the roads, so I don’t know how many people know this wonderful resource exists.
A bit of PHP, HTML parsing and Cacti later and I’ve set up graphs to monitor how many spaces are available and the predictions. “If it moves, graph it”, my favourite motto.
So if you happen to live in Hampshire, and use any of the large car parks you can now check how busy it is, and work out the best time to visit based on the graphs.
All the graphs and details here: http://denness.net/carparks/
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