CarparkShark publishes predicted busyness for around 8,000 car parks across the United Kingdom. It is built for drivers who would rather not arrive at a full car park, and for anyone planning a journey who wants a sense of when a particular spot is likely to be quiet.
What you can find here
For each car park we list, you can see:
- An hour-by-hour heatmap of predicted busyness across the week.
- A short read-out of the busiest and quietest times.
- An estimate of capacity where one is available.
- Nearby alternatives if the car park you wanted is likely to be busy.
The site is free, has no accounts, and works without an app.
Where the data comes from
The list of car parks, their locations, and many of their attributes (such as type, surface or multi-storey, and approximate capacity) come from OpenStreetMap contributors. OpenStreetMap is an open, community-maintained map of the world. Map data is used under the Open Database Licence.
If you spot something wrong on a car park page — a missing entrance, a wrong name, a closed site — the most useful thing you can do is correct it directly on OpenStreetMap. Improvements there flow back into CarparkShark on our next data refresh, and they help every other map and app that uses OSM data.
How the predictions work
CarparkShark’s busyness figures are not live readings. They are estimates, generated from typical usage patterns for car parks of a given type, location, and context. Think of them like the “popular times” you might see on a mapping service: a guide to what an average week tends to look like, not a guarantee of what is happening right now.
This means predictions are most useful for planning ahead. They are less useful as a substitute for actually checking in person if you need to be certain a space is available — for a hospital appointment, a flight, or a fixed-time event, please leave yourself room to be wrong.
Get in touch
For corrections, feedback, or other questions, see the Contact page.