Circling the Block? Apple Maps Could Finally Count Parking Time in Your ETA
Michael Fousert
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New code spotted in the iOS 27.3 beta suggests that Apple may be working on an improvement to Apple Maps that lets it factor parking into its travel time calculations.
While Apple Maps offers limited support for finding parking spots at key venues, thanks to its integration with SpotHero, and also lets you search for parking lots, that doesn’t typically factor in how long it will take you to get from your parked car to your destination — much less how long you might spend driving around trying to find somewhere to park.
That can be a big problem in busy cities. Apple Maps’ ETA only shows you the time it takes to drive your car directly to the front door of your destination, which is fine if you’re dropping someone off, but in Toronto I find I usually have to mentally add at least ten minutes when heading downtown.
Apple seems to be working on a way to address this, with a new “TimeToPark” flag that’s been discovered in the iOS 27.3 beta by code sleuth pdfu.
It’s not entirely clear how this works yet, as it’s not a user-facing feature. However, pdfu suggests that it tracks individual user habits to measure how much time you drove around near your destination, presumably looking for parking, and also how long it took you to walk from your car, using CoreRoutine — the background location and motion features built into iOS.
These are saved for each trip by weekday and hour, presumably so that Apple can anonymously aggregate this data, similarly to what it does for traffic patterns, thereby providing a baseline that can be factored into travel time estimates.
The TimeToPark feature isn’t enabled in any way just yet on external builds, which means Apple isn’t even collecting this data right now. This suggests that it could be a while before we see this feature actually launch in any way that’s immediately useful to end users.
It’s unlikely Apple is going to try to deliver parking time estimates until it has enough data to reliably calculate those times. This raises the possibility that TimeToPark might be quietly turned on in the background before we see the feature go live in Apple Maps.
Apple will undoubtedly still require users to opt into it in some way, whether as a specific tracking metric or part of a broader Apple Maps data collection and sharing policy. We’d suggest reading the fine print on the next such request that comes in if you’re curious or concerned about this.
As things stand right now, it’s not even possible to enable TimeToPark except on “internal devices” — those used by Apple employees who may be testing the feature. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the appearance of a feature in beta code tells us virtually nothing about when it will arrive. After all, code for Apple’s AirTags was found in early iOS 13 betas in June 2019, and the name leaked in October of that year — almost two years before the first AirTags actually launched.
