Parking Nerds Gather at BMW’s Incubator Opening in NYC

I was in attendance at last night’s launch party for BMW i Ventures in Manhattan’s West Village. You can get a good idea of how serious this auto maker is in their new venture fund and startup incubator from their … hor d’oeuvres. There were at least 4 different pesto spreads–artichoke, basil, and a purplish beet mixture–which were documented with little cards.

BMW understands Manhattan food culture, clearly. And based on the speakers, they definitely grok its number one gripe … parking and traffic.

BMW has sunk over a $100 million into this investment fund, and we got a chance to see some of the startups they’ve supported.

Puneet Mehta from MyCityWay was on hand to tell us about his geo-based urban resource iPhone app, which received a few awards at NYC’s 2010 BigApps competition. This is a BigApps success story by several measures: reaching four million activations worldwide with their mobility service platform and receiving financing from BMW. Puneet’s team will now claim a few desks at i Ventures’ Morton Street space, where they’ll continue their development efforts.

The quirkiest part of this event was the discussion from the panel, which can only be described as a tribe of parking and traffic nerds. The consensus from this group was that technology in this space has not advanced since the automated gate. Wondering if these guys have seen Manhattan’s elevator-style garages, where the cars are stacked on top of each other? That has to count as an innovation.

Panelist Kurt Buechler, an exec from Steetline, which uses a small sensor to monitor parking, informed us that somewhere between 25 to 40% of all traffic in major cities is made up of cars prowling for empty spaces. You want more stats? Buechler said that the parking space market in the US is around $25 billion, and there are over 70,000 parking locations.

The Streetline sensor, which is the size of a small Manhattan pothole, signals a server when a parking space is empty, and that data is then distributed over the web. With their app, the parking consumer learns where the spaces are, and how much they cost. Steetline users can then make an instant reservation from their car.

Buecheler described motorists currently as “blind squirrels” scurrying around looking for spaces. Nice NYish metaphor. Sometimes I even feel like a parking pigeon, randomly pecking for a morsel.

A new way to crack the traffic puzzle came from Bill Schwebel, who is the marketing guy at Inrix. Inrix is based on crowdsourcing traffic and parking information to millions of GPS-equipped drivers.

Schwebel also supplied additional nerdly congestion data.

“The average commuter spends a week a year in traffic, and in mega-cities they spend two weeks a year in traffic,” Schwebel almost gleefully told the crowd. Inrix receives billions of geo data points from fleet vehicles, mobile gadgets, and now cars with built-in GPS.

Launched seven years ago with algorithms borrowed from Microsoft (apparently this was something Bill Gates and his former partner Paul Allen had worked on), Inrix supplies the state of the traffic in real-time to over 200 millions drivers worldwide, as well traditional media outlets for their traffic reports. Inrix also offers advice on how to get around these snarls.

And if traffic has a theoretician, it would be NYU’s Mitchel Moss, Director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy. Moss told this somewhat boisterous and noisy room of developers and startup founders–hey, wasn’t that Tred’s Grant Feek I saw–that cities are about movement and face-to-face meetings.

Since we’re not building new highway infrastructure the way we used, and that includes basic stuff like signs, Moss sees the smartphone as a kind of virtual infrastructure. People are using it as their go-to resource, instead of those moldy 20th-century curiosities, information kiosks and subway maps.

Moss has a depressing view of our public transportation departments. Fair enough, but some of those same issues of accuracy and reliability can also arise with our newer Internet models.

Perhaps that bit of Gates-Allen Microsoft code should be checked a little more closely for bugs and security. Just saying.