10 Mar 2018

Yet another Norwich City Parking website

The fine people of Norwich probably don't need yet another web page that displays live parking space data for all the major car parks in the City.

I have always been half interested in putting up my own page that does exactly this. But there were so many others that were doing a good enough job that I never bothered to get around to it.  I think the original page that I (and my mother-in-law) were routinely using was on the ihop2.info domain (or something). But then that disappeared and I had to find a substitute. The search for a replacement did just enough to pique my interest as to where the parking data actually comes from (It's an xml feed from data.gov.uk that's updated every 5 mins, probably the same data that's used to put the parking data up on the boards in the city?). Once I knew this, I just had to put my own offering together. So yes, there is now indeed another web page that displays live parking data for Norwich City car parks, courtesy of me (it's a pleasure).

I put it up because I can, but also because I wanted to fine tune the way that the parking data is displayed to be most useful. So my site places an emphasis on the number of parking spaces that are actually free in each car park and doesn't clutter the display with total capacity or other unnecessary information. I have included sorting functionality so that the car parks with the most free spaces display towards the top of the list. I also compare current car park capacity versus the previous data received which enables me to determine how busy the car parks currently are - So I have added a note when a car park is filling up. There are maps for each car park location and recent activity so that you can see how many cars have left a car park since the data was last updated which adds some sense of what's actually going on in the City I think.

In addition to car park data I also display the date and time of the next home game for the Canaries at Carrow Road (Yellows!). This notice serves as support and a warning that the City will probably get busier around the time that the match is played.

Anyway, please check it out if you are interested and tell your friends about it too if you find it helpul: parkingcanary.co.uk


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