Samantha Davis

Contributing Writer

As an expanding university with over 41,000 students and just over 11,000 faculty members, Florida State University is notorious for its parking difficulties. Just over half of FSU students currently have their vehicles registered for on-campus parking, and with a mere 6 garages and multiple scattered parking lots, finding a spot within the 11,000 available spaces can be difficult. Chris Moutsos, an FSU computer science major and web developer, saw this problem and decided to create a solution: caniparkfsu.herokuapp.com.

Moutsos’ website predicts future garage occupancies based on past data continuously collected from the FSU Tranz app, an app that allows users to view occupancy levels of all 6 parking garages.

He explained that while the FSU Tranz app works well for real-time data, it’s nearly impossible for a student to plan where to park later in the day.

“The FSU Tranz app is great and that’s where all the data from my website comes from, but you can’t plan anything from it. With a little coding mixed with the data I’ve been collecting since mid-December, a simple algorithm is used that’s able to predict parking garage occupancy at any given time in the future,” Moutsos said.

Many students spend up to 20 minutes finding parking spaces, while others may opt to drive to campus an hour before their classes start to better their chances of finding a spot. Lexi Naetzker, a senior FSU student, voiced her experiences.

“Typically for my morning classes, I drive to campus about 45 minutes before they start. Since parking isn’t guaranteed for every student who has a car, finding a spot can be competitive,” she said.

Naetzker then explained that she’s sometimes unable to secure a free parking spot in one of the garages or parking lots. She stated that on those days she has to park in a metered spot and pay in order to attend class.

“I don’t really see FSU building more parking garages in the near future, so I would definitely use this predictive parking website. I think it would be useful to a large percentage of students that drive to campus daily,” Naetzker remarked.

The uncertainty of FSU’s parking availability leads many students who have cars to either bike, walk or take the bus to campus.

Moutsos hopes that his website gives students a more secure feeling about parking availability rather than having to guess and hope for a spot. He said that the next possible step to enhancing his website would be adding visual graphs to plot garage occupancies for a certain time period.

Moutsos also stated that it wouldn’t be difficult for FSU to duplicate his prediction algorithm and enhance their Tranz app:

“I’d love for them to add predictions to their app. That’s what I wanted in the first place,” he said.