GdeParkovka

“Where’s parking”: a map of free parking spots in Russia. Drivers add the spots themselves, with no registration, and vote them up or down. Most of the 367 spots are in the centre of Saint Petersburg, where parking costs up to 360 rubles an hour.

Open the map ▶

Six years ago I moved to Saint Petersburg and bought a car. I didn’t want to pay for parking, so every time I found an empty courtyard or a corner where a car bothers nobody, I saved it in my navigator. Friends started passing my list around, and I decided it should be a public map.

The map isn’t against paid parking. It’s against chaotic parking. A driver who can’t or won’t pay leaves the car somewhere anyway, on a traffic island or in a paid spot without paying. A legal free spot nearby means fewer cars in the way, fewer tow trucks and fewer blocked courtyards.

The map in the centre of Saint Petersburg. 1600×1000, 341 KB

Who it helps

People on an average income, for whom 400 rubles saved on parking matters.
People who can’t pay at the moment, when the mobile internet is switched off or they have no Russian SIM card or bank account.
Couriers who drive, for whom the 15 free minutes are not always enough.
Someone taking a person with limited mobility to hospital for a few hours.

How it works

Anyone can put a spot on the map, with a photo if they like. New spots, photos and comments are published after I check them; I approve the plausible ones, and the votes do the rest.
A spot’s card has its votes and their history, the number of places, photos, comments and links to a route in the navigator.
The number of places is a vote too. Everyone can say how many cars fit, and the map shows the answer most people gave.
Photos are compressed hard, to JPEG quality 45 and 1024 px, because a driver only needs the general view. Re-encoding also strips the EXIF, with the author’s GPS in it.
Voting needs no account. The browser keeps an anonymous ID, and at most 5 people from one IP address can vote on a spot. The addresses themselves aren’t stored, only their salted hashes.

What went wrong

In one Saint Petersburg Telegram chat the map was argued about for several days. Some found it useful, others dangerous. Residents of the centre are afraid that drivers will come to the places where they are used to parking.
Some of them downvote the spots next to their houses. I’ve seen those spots myself, so I don’t count these votes as fair.
Comments got spam and swearing. Now they are checked against a dictionary of word roots that sees through Latin look-alike letters and words spaced out letter by letter.
At first anyone could simply change the number of places at a spot, so it became a vote.

more votes up more down even
Every public spot in the centre of Saint Petersburg, 344 of them, in the order they were added. There is no map underneath: the river and the islands show where nobody parks.

Live since	6 July 2026
Spots on the map	367
Built in	one evening
Server	500 rubles a month
My time	half an hour a day

Node.js and SQLite in one process, Leaflet and OpenStreetMap, on 1 CPU and 512 MB.

I built it with Claude Code in one evening and a couple of dozen rounds, after gdebenz.ru, a map of fuel stations. The design is the one the model made, emoji included, and I left it on purpose, because what matters is that the map works. I don’t plan to make money on it. Next I want to print posters with a QR code and put them up around the district, because drivers are easier to find on the street than online.