Swedish app developer EasyPark has developed a new predictive parking technology called Find & Pay application, which is claimed to reduce the time spent finding spaces by 50% in congested European cities.

According to a study, motorists spend nearly 2,500 hours of their life in finding a parking space for their car, while nearly 30% of traffic congestions in the cities are caused by people searching for parking, which could contribute to nearly 50 million tons of pollution across Europe.

EasyPark Group CEO Johan Birgersson said: “Our technology teams have worked tirelessly for over a decade to solve one of the toughest unanswered challenges in car travel, how to quickly find suitable parking in our increasingly congested cities.

“Today’s navigation options take you to your destination, but fall flat when you need to find somewhere to park.

“It’s a very frustrating experience when you get where you need to go, but simply can’t park your car. Find & Pay solves this significant challenge for motorists.

“We’re hugely excited to start bringing the technology to market and to see the profound impact it will have on driver frustration and the challenges of congestion and pollution in cities. This technology has the potential to reduce emissions in cities by hundreds of thousands of tonnes.”

“Today’s navigation options take you to your destination, but fall flat when you need to find somewhere to park.”

The company explained that its new app uses big data, predictive analytics and machine learning to locate a parking space in less time, helping motorists, as well as reducing congestion and emissions caused by driving around in a city looking for somewhere to park.

In comparison to other sensor-based technologies, Find & Pay combines large volumes of transaction data with crowd-sourced location information from users and IoT devices to create a parking probability map of every city block for any given hour of the day.

Based on this information, the application provides information to give users a route to their destination that passes along streets with the highest probability of parking availability.

The app also provides turn-by-turn navigation along the route and lets users remotely manage and pay for the parking space when they arrive, creating a simple, seamless experience.

By using more than 500 testers across 31 cities, the application is undergoing large-scale beta trials to verify, validate and increase predictive accuracy.

The company intends to launch the app in Stockholm in September, while it is planned to be introduced to more than 30 European cities later this year.

In addition, the application is planned to be launched in London, New York, and other major cities worldwide within the next couple of years.