ABSTRACT
The Eno Foundation reports a variant of cruising termed "mobile parking," which is an alternative to stationary parking: Most parking studies have considered only standing vehicles. The first research on cruising was, appropriately, conducted in Detroit. Cruising wasn't a problem when only a few rich people owned cars, but as the number of drivers increased, the search for open curb spaces became more and more difficult. In 1977 the German Automobile Club set up video cameras at each intersection in central Freiburg and used them to follow randomly selected cars as they traveled from one intersection to another. In 1984, Ilan Salomon conducted a study of commuters to the Central Business District of Jerusalem to examine car owners' decisions about whether to drive to work and where to park. The researchers estimated that an astonishing 74 percent of the 800 cars tracked on camera were cruising for parking and would have parked immediately had they found a space.
