The journey of a thousand miles usually begins and ends with finding a parking space. To make it easier to find and pay for that space, various technologies that have long been popular overseas are coming to a garage or street near you.

These innovations include online reservation and available space tracking systems, paying for parking using credit cards and other cashless mechanisms, new ways to monitor and enforce residential street parking, and automated garages that transport your car off the street robotically. These aren’t just flashy hi-tech toys, but help make parking more convenient, reduce the frustration and congestion of drivers circling parking lots, and increase revenue and space utilization for cash-starved cities too.

You can read more about these technologies in my story in the New York Times here.