An online Russian newspaper ‘The Village’ has launched an app and a media campaign designed to try and stop illegal and inconsiderate parking.

Using the app on a mobile phone, the public take photos of the parking offenders, capturing photos of the car and the number plates. Image recognition technology then reads the number plates to identify the driver of the vehicle.

Then, the name of the driver, along with photos of their car, are published to the newspaper’s website, on banners and media placements; as well as allowing people to post the details to their own facbeook pages as well; naming and shaming the drivers; with a message ‘Share to remove’ (the poor parking).

It’s an interesting way of crowd-sourcing and social shaming for poor parking, and will be very interesting to see if it has any effect. We’re not too sure about the name for the application, however – the Parking Douche App. Find out more in the video below. 

Introducing Park4U: an iOS / Android app that delivers ‘assisted parking’ by remotely parking your car.

According to Engadget, the system is currently available on a limited number of Volkswagen-group models including the Touran, Sharan, Audi A6, Audi A7 and the Seat Alhambra. The company is planning to have 38 models equipped with the tech by year's end. See it in action below.

A Suzuki Swift Sport ad has been banned in Australia by health and safety authorities, who believe it portrays irresponsible ‘hoon’ driving and linking speeding and dangerous driving with sex appeal.

Officials say the ad depicts unsafe driving by showing the car sliding about in a car park, and includes footage of hard acceleration. The complaint even goes as far to say that the car has its fog lights on in a multi-storey car park, which is against the Australian road rules. 

A new type of garage is on sale from architects EcoSpace which turns the once humble and hidden away parking garage into the centrepiece of your back garden.

The modular garage is designed to be a showroom for your car, with features like ambient lighting, floor-to-ceiling glazing and even modular storage systems available. Security is taken care of with roller blinds, and the garages come with natural materials and insulation as standard.

At a cost of $70,000, the AutoSpace offers tailored, contemporary design to your specific needs - so you can have multiple cars, a workshop or office space built in. Perhaps a bed so you never need be away from your car for too long?

The New York Times recently carried an article by Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at MIT and author of ‘Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking’. In it, Ben-Joseph shares his vision for transforming the parking lot into a space beyond simply providing parking availability and convenience.

He believes that the parking lot needs to evolve to include a variety of other uses, mitigate its effect on the environment and give greater consideration to aesthetics and architectural context.

Environmentally, parking lots come with costs – including increased heat from the exposed asphalt pavement, as well as water runoff from the impervious surfaces. A better parking lot might be covered with solar canopies so that it could produce energy while lowering heat, or may be surfaced with a permeable material like porous asphalt and planted with trees in rows like an apple orchard, so that it could sequester carbon and clean contaminated runoff.

Parking lots are also one of the most utilised outdoor spaces – public spaces that people interact with and use on a daily basis, and one of the few places where cars and pedestrians coexist. Better parking lots would expand and embrace this role, providing a range of public activities such as farmers markets and food stalls, contributing as much to their communities as great boulevards, parks or plazas.

Some great concepts, thinking and questioning of the role of parking lots in our society. Read more on the NY Times website here, or more on Ben-Joseph’s book here. 

We received an email from an anonymous contributor this week with images from Italy of the new Italian Lamborghini Gallardo Police car. One of two new high-speed patrol cars designed to catch speeding drivers.

It seems as though the car met an unfortunate end, although one of our eagle-eyed contributors did point out that the numberplates from the second and the last photo don’t match…

A new apartment block in Miami has elevators to take residents directly to their units whilst they are sitting in their cars.

The $560 million tower is a collaboration between Germany-based Porsche Design Group and a local developer, Gil Dezer. According to the Miami Herald, after the resident pulls over and switches off the engine, a robotic arm that works much like an automatic plank will scoop up the car and put it into the elevator. Once at the desired floor, the same robotic arm will park the car, leaving the resident nearly at his front door.

The glass elevators will give residents and their guests unparalleled views of the city or the ocean during their high-speed ride, expected to last 45 to 90 seconds. Residents will be able to see their cars from their living rooms.

The 57-story luxury tower will have 132 units. Smaller units will be allocated two parking spaces and larger ones will have four, with 284 robotic parking spaces in total, serviced by three elevators.

Thanks to Andrew Morse, our resident Senior Traffic Engineer, we came across this fantastic music clip, called ‘Got More’, by a band called Eskmo. It’s a stunning animation totally created from footage filmed at a New York intersection. We highly recommend watching through as the animation becomes ever more Escher-like.

We have come across two technological innovations this week from auto manufacturer Mercedes that are pushing the boundaries in parking and driving.

The first sees the integration of Apple’s voice recognition technology (called ‘Siri’) into their vehicles, allowing users to access their iPhone and applications through voice commands. According to Discovery.com, the system will transfer the phone’s screen to the car's system screen so that drivers can listen to music, update social networks statuses and send texts.

The second innovation is called ‘Mercedes TweetFleet’, and sees a fleet of cars that include a new feature, alerting you when there is a car parking space free as you drive past. To make people aware of the new feature, they developed a smart campaign that featured a fleet of cars that tweeted when they came in proximity of a free car space. View more on this video below.