Westpark started as a simple idea: what if locals could help each other find parking? Here's where we are, and where we hope this goes.
Timeline
Spring 2026
20 downtown lots
Summer 2026
Compo Beach seasonal coverage
Q3 2026
Saugatuck Station + SMS reporting
2027
ML model trained on real Westport data
Westpark is a free parking prediction tool for downtown Westport. It combines reports from locals with weather, time of day, the Westport community calendar, and school schedules to produce a real-time answer for every lot downtown.
No sensors. No hardware. Just residents helping residents.
Twenty downtown lots, real-time predictions, local reports. Launch and prove the model. Show that crowd-sourced intelligence can help a problem that years of study and significant public investment haven't fully solved.
Seasonal coverage for Compo Beach — live before Memorial Day weekend. The same crowd-sourced prediction model applied to beach parking, where demand spikes are just as predictable and just as frustrating.
Train station parking added for Saugatuck commuters. SMS reporting for residents who prefer to text. Verified cross-confirmation — when three users report the same condition, prediction confidence goes up.
Right now the model uses hand-tuned rules — we wrote them based on what we know about Westport. As reports accumulate, those rules give way to a machine learning model trained on real local data. Patterns will emerge that no human would have thought to program. The system gets more accurate over time without anyone having to maintain it.
Westpark is only as smart as the community behind it. Every local who opens the app and reports what they see — even once, even in five seconds — makes the predictions better for everyone who comes after them.
We're starting with downtown. We'll grow from there. But only if Westport wants this.