Free parking in Swiss cities — day 13 of 26

Type where you're going. See where you can park for free at that time, what to set on your parking disc, when to move the car — and, later in the day, when the limits stop.

Live at freeparking.onedaybuilt.com.

The one decision everything follows from

An instruction, not a map. Parking apps give you a map to study at a red light. This gives one sentence — Park on Steinwiesstrasse. Set your disc to 14:30. Move the car by 15:30. — with the map as a thumbnail and the next streets underneath in case it's full. Below that, a timeline of when it gets free later: blue zones need no disc from 19:00, most meters stop at 20:00, Sunday has no limit.

Every result copies straight into Google Maps. People plan the drive in Maps, so each spot has "Copy for Google Maps" and "Open in Google Maps". The copy is the spot's coordinates (47.37067, 8.54850), not the street name: the city data has no house numbers, and a street name alone lands in the middle of the street — on a long one, half a kilometre from the spaces. The link uses the documented Maps URLs form (/maps/search/?api=1&query=lat%2Clng), which needs no key and opens the Maps app on a phone.

The field takes a place or an address. A pasted address works as it is — "Kunsthaus Zürich, Heimplatz 1, 8001 Zürich" resolves to Heimplatz 1 — and the phone keyboard's search key picks the first match. The page then lists up to seven free spots within 1 km, nearest first, one per street.

No account, no app, no database, no AI. The page is static; all the work is done in the browser against one 141 KB file rebuilt every night.

Cities: five, and why not the others yet

The page picks the city from the destination — no city picker. A city is added only when its official open data says where every space is and what kind it is. Found through ckan.opendata.swiss (the catalogue answers scripts there; opendata.swiss itself refuses them) and each city's own map service.

City	Street-parking data	Places used	Verdict
Zurich	City of Zurich DAV layers, daily, CC0	blue 25,036 · paid, free outside meter hours 6,100	live
Geneva (whole canton)	SITG OTC_STATIONNEMENT_V_PUBLIQUE; free reuse with the source named, commercial use needs permission	blue 27,198 · no limit 2,210 · with a limit 5,820	live
Bern	Geoportal Parkplaetze_oeffentlich WFS, blue zone layer; opendata.swiss "terms_open"	blue 11,112	live
Lausanne	map.lausanne.ch WFS, blue (macaron) and white zones; opendata.swiss "terms_by"	blue 6,099 · no limit 4 · with a limit 572	live
Lucerne	OGD oeffentlicher_parkplatz WFS; opendata.swiss "terms_open"	blue 1,562 · with a limit 1,026 · paid 07–19, free outside 242	live
Basel	open Parkflächen table (CC BY) — every stretch with street, type, fee hours and count, but no positions; placed along its street from OpenStreetMap	blue 19,900 · paid, free outside hours 1,417	live, street level
Biel, Zug, St. Gallen	datasets exist (Biel and Zug current, St. Gallen from 2023)	—	not built yet
Winterthur, Lugano	no space-level dataset found	—	no data
OpenStreetMap, any city	0–4 streets per city with a parking rule mapped	—	cannot say where parking is free

Street names for Bern, Lausanne and Lucerne come from OpenStreetMap. Their parking data has none. Once a night the build asks Overpass for the named streets in each city's box and names a stretch after the nearest one within 45 m, ignoring footpaths, pedestrian zones, steps and cycle paths — cars do not park on those. Unnamed stretches (Bern: 192 of 1,387) say "Park in the blue zone 150 m away" rather than guess. The page credits OpenStreetMap.

Positions. Lausanne sends Swiss LV95 coordinates, converted with swisstopo's approximate formulas (0.36 m off at Bundesplatz 3, Bern, checked). Bern's and Lucerne's WFS both claim EPSG:4326 but send the axes in opposite orders; latitude and longitude ranges never overlap in Switzerland, so the numbers decide. Bern marks most of its own positions "ungenau" (approximate).

Basel is street level, and the page says so

Basel-Stadt publishes Parkflächen openly, and it is current — but 0 of its 7,815 rows carry a position. The layer that has positions, "Parkieren: Parkflächen", is category B, beschränkt öffentlich: not orderable in the geodata shop, only through a special login applied for by form. The free shop product "Parkierung" holds special parking (disabled spaces, taxis, garages), which is no use here.

So each Basel row is placed along its own street: the street is cut into ~80 m pieces from OpenStreetMap and the street's spaces are shared out along it, keeping the total exact (rounding each piece on its own lost a fifth of the spaces). 96% of car rows match a street by name; the rest differ only in spacing ("St.Johanns-Ring" against "St. Johanns-Ring"), which normalising fixes, and 10 rows (70 spaces) match nothing and are dropped.

A Basel answer therefore reads "Park along Leonhardsstrasse", the page says Basel publishes the street and not the exact space, and the copy button gives Leonhardsstrasse, Basel — a point would look exact when it is not.

The rule at a spot, not only the state right now

"Free now" is only half an answer: people check the evening before, or for next Tuesday. Every result — the instruction, each row in the list, and each dot on the map — carries the rule that applies there whatever the hour:

The rule here: Blue zone: 1 hour with a disc, Mon–Sat 08:00–19:00. Free with no limit outside those hours.

Geneva

SITG type	Places	What the page does
Gratuit 60 min	27,198	blue zone — the national disc rules; Geneva's Fondation des Parkings states the same hours, lunch rule and night rule
Gratuit illimité	2,210	free, no time limit — no disc, no move-by time
Gratuit 30/120/180/240 min, 8/15 heures	5,820	free with a disc for that long. The hours the limit applies are not in the data, so it counts as always on: the answer can only be stricter than the sign
Payant …	~5,200	dropped — no paid hours in the data
Gratuit jaune, Habitant / nuit, Police, 2 roues, Vélos, …	—	dropped

The street names in the Geneva data are a third wrong. 4,333 of 12,731 stretches are named "Route de Foliaz" — a road in Collonge-Bellerive — while lying all over the canton. The first build told someone at Rue du Rhône to "Park on Route de Foliaz". Every name is now checked against the canton's official street graph (GMO_GRAPHE_VOIES_OFFICIELLES): placeholders and empty names take the nearest official street within 45 m (1,949 on day 13), and any other name more than 300 m from its own street is replaced the same way (13). Official names write surnames in capitals ("Quai WILSON"); the page writes "Quai Wilson", as Google Maps does.

SITG rows carry no date, so the page says "fetched" with the build date, not "from".

Also caught in the browser, not by the unit tests: the place search asks for German names, so Geneva comes back as "Genf". The first coverage check only accepted "Genève" and sent Plainpalais to "not covered". Every language form is accepted now, and qa/finder.test.mjs checks "Genf".

Why Zurich first

It has the strongest hook and, checked on day 13, the best data. The dataset most people find stops at the end of 2021; the one used here is updated daily and is CC0. Full comparison with Basel, Geneva, Lausanne and Bern in ../prep/cities.md.

Layer (WFS oeffentlich_zugaengliche_Parkplaetze_DAV)	Used for
oeff_strassenparkierung_dav_p — 13,272 spaces as points	blue zone spaces; paid spaces
oeff_strassenparkierung_dav_l — parallel stretches with length	blue zone stretches (length ÷ 5.5 m = cars)
oeff_strassenparkierung_spuzpu — 1,397 meters with tariff text	when each paid space is charged
Strassennamenverzeichnis sv_str_lin	the street name in the instruction

The rules, and where each one comes from

All in src/lib/rules.ts, with sources in ../prep/rules.md:

Rule	Source
Blue zone limited Monday–Saturday 08:00–19:00	SSV Art. 48
Sundays and public holidays unlimited unless a sign says so	SSV Art. 48
Disc set to the next hour or half-hour mark; stay 1 hour	SSV Art. 48, Stadt Winterthur
Arrive 11:30–13:29 → stay until 14:30	Stadt Winterthur
19:00–07:59 no disc if you leave before 08:00	Stadt Winterthur
Paid spaces charged by their meter's hours, e.g. HOCH 2h Mo-Sa 09:00-20:00	the city's own meter data

Where the law or the data is unclear, the code picks the answer that sends nobody to a ticket — an earlier "move by", never a later one:

• On an exact half-hour the disc uses that mark, not the next one.
• Public holidays are treated as working days (the page says so).
• "Arrive after 18:00, stay until 09:00" is on blogs but in no official source, so it is not used.
• A paid space outside meter hours says "no fee", never "no limit": no source was found on whether the time limit still applies then. The page says "check the sign".

What is left out, on purpose

• White spaces with a disc (art = Parkscheibe, 610): the data has no maximum duration for them, so there is no instruction to give.
• 2,310 paid spaces whose meters within 120 m disagree on hours, or carry a special tariff ("Zoo ganze Woche", "Kreis 5 Spezial" — Zurich-West is charged Thursday to Sunday around the clock). Guessing would send people to tickets.
• Occupancy. No city publishes which spaces are empty. The page says it shows where free parking is allowed, and that the street sign always wins.

Tests — each attacked, not just run

pnpm test    # 131 checks: rules, the real data file of every city, and each city's type mapping
node qa/contrast.mjs                                             # every text colour ≥ 4.5:1 on its surface

• Breaking the lunch rule on purpose (14:30 → 14:00) made rules.test.mjs fail. Restored.
• build-data.mjs refuses to publish a file with fewer than 50 spots — a first file has nothing to compare with, and Lausanne's first build read 1,210 stretches, used 0 (its shapes sit in <ms:geom>, not where the reader looked) and wrote a valid, empty file. Attacked with an empty file: refused, nothing written.
• build-data.mjs refuses to overwrite the published file when the spot count falls by more than a third. Attacked by tripling yesterday's count: exit 1, file untouched.

The data refresh

.github/workflows/data.yml runs scripts/build-data.mjs at 02:30 UTC for all five cities, runs every test file against the new files, and commits public/data/ only if it changed. Geneva's file carries its fetch date, so it changes — and redeploys — once a day. A city whose server fails keeps its old file and fails the job; the other city still updates. The commit redeploys on Vercel. If the city's WFS fails, the job fails and the site keeps serving yesterday's file with yesterday's date on it.

Found by the live audit, after the copy buttons shipped

• React hydration error #418 on every load. The page is prerendered once, and the build baked its own clock into the time chip ("Now · Tue 20:15"), which never matched the visitor's. The clock now starts in the browser; the chip says "Now" until it does. Only visible on the production build — the dev server did not show it.
• "Bundesplatz Bern" silently became "Bernegg", a street in Zurich. The search added "Zürich" to every query and hid every result outside the city, so a Bern address was swapped for a Zurich lookalike with no warning. It now runs the text as typed alongside the Zurich query; when the text as typed means a place outside Zurich, that place comes first, marked "outside Zurich", and picking it says "Only Zurich so far".

Four changes after the first day of use

• The map is answerable. Every dot opens the street, the kind of parking, the distance, the rule there and a Maps link; the destination dot says so too. A legend sits under the map. Dots with no explanation were decoration.
• The phone no longer zooms when the field is tapped. iOS zooms a page when an input's text is under 16px, and the zoom stays after typing, which made the rest of the page awkward. Every input is 16px.
• The search lists places, not addresses. The name comes first with a mark for what it is (🏛 museum, 🛒 shop, 🚉 station …), the address underneath. Photographs would need a paid photo service; this is what free data gives.
• Duplicate list keys. In Basel a blue zone and a paid space can share one street piece, so the position alone was not unique and React warned that rows could be dropped. The key now carries the kind and the street.

Search, rebuilt after a real test on a phone

Typing "Apple basel" offered the city of Basel and "Heidi-Abel-Weg", never the Apple Store. swisstopo's SearchServer knows addresses, place names and stops — no shops, no businesses. The field now asks two sources:

• Photon (photon.komoot.io, OpenStreetMap data) for places people name: "Apple Store" → Rennweg 43, "Migros Oerlikon" → Baumackerstrasse 35. Limited to Switzerland, biased to Zurich, with bus platforms, tram stops, fire alarm panels and the like filtered out.
• swisstopo, only when the text has a number, for exact Swiss addresses. A number with no town named ("Bahnhofstrasse 1") is also asked as a Zurich address and listed first — as typed, it came back as Goldau, Eschenz, Elgg.

"Outside Zurich" is decided by the town name the search returns, not by a rectangle: the Glatt centre in Wallisellen sits inside the rectangle and has no City of Zurich parking data.

Outside services

Service	Terms, checked 2026-09-15
swisstopo SearchServer (the destination box)	free, no key; fair use 20 requests a minute per client — the box waits 350 ms for a pause in typing, needs 3 characters, and sends two queries per pause
swisstopo grey national map tiles	free, no key; credit "© swisstopo" on the map
Photon (place search)	free, no key; "please be fair — extensive usage will be throttled", no availability guarantee; OpenStreetMap data, credited on the page
City of Zurich open data	CC0
City of Bern, City of Lucerne (opendata.swiss "terms_open")	free use
Ville de Lausanne (opendata.swiss "terms_by")	free use with the source named — credited on the page
OpenStreetMap via Overpass (street names for Bern, Lausanne, Lucerne)	ODbL, credited; three queries a night
SITG (Canton of Geneva)	free reuse with the source named; commercial use needs prior permission — this site is free, and credits "source: SITG"

The browser calls swisstopo directly; this site has no server code except the share image at /api/og.

Timing notes

• Walking time is 1.3 × the straight distance at 80 m a minute, shown as "about".
• Times are Zurich wall-clock minutes; on the two clock-change nights a time can be an hour off. No rule changes between 02:00 and 03:00.

Running it

pnpm install
pnpm data      # fetch and build public/data/zurich.json
pnpm dev