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.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
